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OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 


GIFT 
of 

Prof.   Hugh  Miller 


(V.  &L'f^<tn 


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MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 


MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

AN  INTRODUCTION  TO  METAPHYSICS 


BY 

JOSEPH  ALEXANDER  LEIGHTON,  Ph.D.,  LL.D. 

PROFESSOR    OF    PHILOSOPHY    IN    THE    OHIO    STATE    UNIVERSITY; 

AUTHOR  OF   "THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY,"    "TYPICAL 

MODERN  CONCEPTIONS  OF  GOD,"    ETC. 


D.  APPLETON   AND   COMPANY 

NEW  YORK     :  :    MCMXXII     :  :     LONDON 


COPYRIGHT,  1922,  BY 

D.  APPLETON  AND  COMPANY 


PRINTED  IN  THE  UNITED  8TATE8  OF  AMERICA 


ll 


TO 
MY  TEACHERS  AND  FRIENDS 

JACOB    GOULD   SCHURMAN 
JAMES  EDWIN  CREIGHTON 


775 


PREFACE 

The  following  work  is  a  systematic  consideration  of  the  funda- 
mental problems  and  concepts  of  philosophical  thought  in  the 
light  of  recent  discussion  in  science  and  philosophy.  The  leading 
motive  of  the  entire  work  is  the  problem  of  Human  Personality. 
I  have  therefore  given  the  largest  amount  of  space  to  the  treat- 
ment of  the  Self.  But,  since  one  cannot  consider  the  place  of 
personality  in  the  universe  without  being  drawn  into  the  funda- 
mental problem  of  metaphysics,  namely,  that  of  the  structure  of 
the  universe  as  a  whole,  I  have  tried  to  give  just  consideration  to 
the  latter  problem.  Moreover,  since  philosophy  is  the  thinking 
consideration  of  fundamental  questions,  one  must  settle  accounts 
with  the  problems  of  thought  and  knowledge.  I  have,  therefore, 
begun  with  a  comprehensive  treatment  of  these  problems. 

My  theory  of  knowledge  is  realistic,  but  it  differs  materially 
from  the  standpoints  of  most  of  the  new  realists.  I  hold  that 
the  true  antithesis  in  theories  of  knowledge  is  not  between  realism 
and  idealism,  but  between  realism  and  mentalism  or  subjectivism. 
The  great  idealistic  tradition  in  metaphysics,  from  Plato  to  Hegel, 
Bradley,  and  Bosanquet,  is  not  subjectivistic  in  theory  of  knowl- 
edge. In  the  main,  I  sympathize  most  with  this  tradition,  although 
I  have  found  it  necessary  to  cricitize  the  concepts  of  the  Absolute, 
and  the  equivocal  treatment  of  Time,  Progress,  and  Personality, 
in  recent  representatives  of  metaphysical  idealism.  To  me  the 
dominating  note  of  the  great  idealistic  tradition  is  the  ever  renewed 
attempt  to  determine,  in  the  light  of  reason  and  of  the  history 
of  culture,  the  humanistic  values  of  experience  and  the  place  of 
these  in  the  universe.  My  conception  of  the  meaning  of  the 
universe  is  dynamic.  Therefore  the  metaphysical  standpoint  of 
the  following  work  might  be  called  Dynamic  Idealism,  in  the  sense 
that  it  aims  to  find  in  the  living  universe  a  home  and  scope  for 
humanistic  ideals  or  values.  My  chief  quarrel  with  pragmatic 
humanism  is  that  its  humanism  is  too  narrow,  and  that  it  tends 
to  slight  the  place  of  order  or  reason  in  man  and  the  universe. 

But  I  have  no  interest  in  "philosophy  as  the  art  of  affixing 

vii 


viii  PREFACE 

labels,"  to  use  J.  E.  Creighton's  happy  expression.  Labels  are 
convenient  for  cataloguing  and  storing  goods  for  ready  access, 
but,  in  the  vital,  many-sided  and  global  enterprise  of  thought, 
which  philosophy  is,  they  are  dangerous;  perhaps  their  harmful- 
ness  outweighs  their  usefulness.  I  know  no  great  thinker  whose 
philosophy  is  not  misrepresented  by  such  labels  as  "idealistic," 
"realistic,"  "rationalistic,"  " empiristic, "  etc.  I  hold  no  brief 
for  any  "school"  or  "movement"  of  thought.  I  am  interested 
only  in  trying  to  puzzle  out  such  of  the  meanings  of  the  world 
as  I  can. 

The  extent  of  my  indebtedness  to  philosophers  past  and  present 
will  be  obvious  to  the  instructed  reader.  It  would  be  quite  impos- 
sible, within  the  limits  of  a  preface,  to  make  adequate  acknowledg- 
ment. In  general,  I  have  learned  much  from  those  whom  I  have 
criticized  sharply.  I  cannot,  however,  let  this  opportunity  pass 
without  thanking  my  former  teachers  in  the  Sage  School  of 
Philosophy  of  Cornell  University,  alike  for  their  instruction, 
example,  and  continued  interest.  And  to  the  dear  and  inspiring 
memory  of  the  man  to  whose  instruction  and  warm  personal  inter- 
est I  owe  the  foundation  of  my  philosophical  scholarship  and  the 
encouragement  to  go  on  with  it,  the  late  William  Clark  of  Trinity 
College,  Toronto,  I  here  pay  my  tribute  of  gratitude  and  affection. 

I  am  deeply  indebted  to  the  thoughtful  interest  of  President 
William  Oxley  Thompson  in  suggesting,  and  to  the  trustees  of 
the  Ohio  State  University  in  sanctioning,  my  relief  from  routine 
duties  in  order  to  bring  this  work  to  completion. 

I  am  indebted  to  my  colleagues  in  the  Department  of  Philosophy, 
Doctors  A.  E.  Avey,  A.  R.  Chandler,  and  R.  D.  Williams,  for 
their  never  failing  interest,  and,  especially,  for  the  cheerful 
alacrity  with  which  they  have  relieved  me  of  my  teaching  duties 
in  order  that  I  might  finish  and  publish  this  book.  For  a  number 
of  stylistic  suggestions  I  am  indebted  to  Doctor  Chandler.  Doctors 
J.  E.  Creighton,  Chandler  and  Avey  have  assisted  me  materially 
in  proofreading. 

I  have  incorporated  portions  of  articles  published,  at  intervals 
during  the  past  twenty  years  or  more,  in  The  Philosophical  Review, 
The  Journal  of  Philosophy,  and  The  International  Journal  of 
Elh  ics.     I  make  acknowledgments  to  the  editors  of  these  periodicals. 

Joseph  Alexander  Leighton 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER  PAGE 

I.    Introductory — What  Is  Metaphysics?  ....      1 

I.  The  Scope  of  Metaphysics 1 

II.  The  Method  of  Metaphysics 6 

Appendix:   Phenomenology  as  the  Science  of  Pure 

Consciousness 13 

BOOK  I 

THE  THEORY  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

II.    What  is  Thinking? 25 

Appendix:   Existence  and  Subsistence:   Philosophy  and 

Gegenstandstheorie 39 

III.  Percepts  and  Concepts 44 

IV.  The  Criteria  of  Knowledge 49 

V.    Knowledge  and  Reality 68 

Appendix:    The  New  Critical  Realism       ....     94 

VI.     Appearance  and  Reality 98 

VII.     Error 110 

VIII.    The  Final  Ground  of  Knowledge      ....  116 

BOOK  II 

THE  GENERAL  STRUCTURE  OF  REALITY— 
THE  CATEGORIES 

IX.    What  Are  Categories? 133 

X.  Likeness  and  Unlikeness — Identity  and  Diversity  .  137 

XL    Quantity  and   Quality 142 

XII.    Relations 151 

XIII.  Order 162 

XIV.  The  Particular,  The  Individual,  and  the  Universal  169 
XV.    Substance 181 

XVI.     Change  and  Causality 191 

Appendix:    The  Knowledge  of  Activity  ....  203 
XVII.    Individuality,  Value   and   Purpose      ....  206 

BOOK  III 

EMPIRICAL  EXTSTENTS 

XVIII.    Space  and  Time 215 

I.     Empirical  Space  and  Time 218 

II.  Conceptual  Space  and  Time 219 

III.  Physical  Space  and  Time 223 

Appendix:    Dr.  Alexander's  Theory  of  Space-time       .  235 

ix 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

XIX.    Physical  Reality 238 

Appendix:    Panjxsychism 248 

XX.    Life  and  Mechanism 253 

XXI.    Evolution,   Life   and   Mind 261 

I.     The   Factors   of   Organic   Evolution       .       .        .  261 
II.     The   Mechanistic   Doctrine  of  Evolution       .       .  266 

III.  Evolution  and  Teleology 272 

IV.  Life  and  Matter 276 


BOOK  IV 

PERSONALITY  AND  ITS  VALUES— PHILOSOPHY  OF 
SELFHOOD  AND  SOCIETY 


XXII. 
XXIII. 

XXIV. 


XXV. 

XXVI. 

XXVII. 


XXVIII. 

XXIX. 

XXX. 

XXXI. 

XXXII. 

XXXIII. 
XXXIV. 


The    Problem    of    Personality 289 

The    Nature   of   the    Self 299 

Appendix:  Mr.  Bradley's  Criticism  of  the  Self  .  .  312 
Consciousness 315 

I.     The  Unity  of  Consciousness 316 

II.  Consciousness  and  Its  Objects  ....  317 
III.     The    Idealistic    Theory   of   Consciousness       .        .   329 

The  Subconscious 334 

Multiple  Personality 348 

Mind  and  Body 355 

I.     Dualism 355 

II.     Psychophysical  Parallelism 359 

III.     Psychophysical  Individualism 366 

Appendix  I:  Matter,  Energy  and  Will  ....  377 
Appendix  II:  The  Origin  of  the  Soul  ....  378 
Personality   and   the    Cultural   Order       .       .       .  382 

Personality  and  Values 395 

Ethical  Values 414 

Feeling  and  Values 427 

The  Interrelationships  of  Values       ....  434 

The   Interpersonal   Emotions 445 

Moral  Freedom 448 

Immortality 458 


BOOK  V 
THE  ORDER  OF  THE  UNIVERSE ;  COSMOLOGY 


XXXV. 


XXXVI. 
XXXVII. 


TnE   Universal   Order        . 

I.     The    Spatial    and    Temporal    Order 
II.     The  Ultimate  Noetic  Order 
III.     The   Cosmic   Ground   of   Values 
Appendix:    The  Meanings  of  the  Infinite 
Finite    Selves    and   the    Over-self 
Immanence    and    Transcendence 
Perfection   and   Evolution 


467 
467 
475 
476 
480 
486 
495 
501 


CONTENTS 


XI 


CHAPTER  PAGE 

XXXVIII.    Optimism  and  Pessimism— The  Problem  of  Evil      .  517 

I.     Natural  Evil 517 

II.     Moral  Evil 52L' 

III.     Evil  and  the  Idea  of  a  Perfect  Being      .        .        .  524 

XXXIX.    Metaphysics  and  Religion 536 

I.     The  Methods  and  Aims  of  Metaphysics  and  Re- 
ligion        536 

II.     Is  There  Immediacy  in  Religious  Knowledge?       .   549 
III.     The  Meaning  of  Faith 555 

Postscript 562 

Index 565 


MAN   AND  THE   COSMOS 

CHAPTEK  I 

INTRODUCTORY  :     WHAT  IS  METAPHYSICS  ? 

I.     The  Scope  of  Metaphysics 

The  origin  of  the  term  "metaphysics,"  ta  meta  ta  physica, 
"the  [books]  after  the  physics,"  the  title  given  by  an  editor  to  a 
collection  of  writings  by  Aristotle,  does  not  throw  much  light  on 
the  scope  of  the  discipline.  Probably  the  editor  meant  by  the 
title  to  indicate  that  the  problems  thereof  should  be  taken  up  after 
one  had  studied  natural  science.  Meta,  "after,"  was  later  taken  to 
mean  "beyond"  or  "above,"  and  "metaphysics"  the  science  of 
that  which  transcends  physics.  In  the  body  of  the  writings  in 
question  Aristotle  calls  the  study  first  philosophy,  the  science  of 
Jfeing  or  ontology,  and  theology.  It  may  be  denned,  provisionally, 
'as  the  science  of  the  first  principles  of  reality,  or  the  theory  of 
the  structure  and  meaning  of  reality  as  a  whole,  or  the  theory  of 
the  nature  of  the  cosmos.  Philosophers  are  not  in  entire  agree- 
ment as  to  the  precise  scope  of  the  subject.  All  are  agreed  that 
metaphysics  deals  with  the  problems  of  the  structure  and  meaning 
of  reality;  but  some  hold  that  epistemology,  the  doctrine  of  the 
nature  of  knowledge  and  its  place  in  reality,  is  a  separate  disci- 
pline. Some  hold  that  the  problems  of  the  place  of  values  in 
reality  or  of  the  relationships  of  existence  and  value  (axiology) 
do  not  belong  to  metaphysics.  If  one  accepted  these  distinctions, 
philosophical  system  would  consist  of  three  parts — epistemology, 
metaphysics,  and  axiology,  or  the  theory  of  the  place  of  truth, 
goodness  and  beauty  in  the  universe.  I  hold  that  metaphysics 
includes  all  these  problems  and,  therefore,  is  identical  with  philo- 
sophical system.  While  it  would  not  be  in  accord  with  historic 
usage  to  deny  the  term  "philosopher"  to  every  thinker  who  has  not 


2  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

achieved  a  systematic  conception  of  the  universe,  a  cosmology  or 
metaphysics,  a  full  or  well-rounded  philosophy  is  a  theory  of  the 
universe.  Hence  metaphysics  is  identical  in  scope  with  philo- 
sophical system.  It  is  the  theory  of  the  first  principles  of  reality. 
It  is  impossible  to  formulate  a  theory  of  truth  or  knowledge  with- 
out formulating  a  theory  of  reality.  It  is  equally  impossible  to 
consider  the  place  of  values  in  reality  without  raising  the  entire 
problem  of  the  nature  and  place  of  personality;  and  the  latter 
problem  includes  all  the  problems  of  the  relation  of  the  mental  and 
the  physical,  of  the  individual  and  the  universal,  of  identity  and 
diversity,  causation,  substance,  space  and  time,  thought  and 
reality.  Since  every  fundamental  problem  of  philosophy  is  inter- 
locked with  all  the  others,  it  is,  in  the  end,  the  most  consistent  pro- 
cedure to  recognize  that  metaphysics  and  philosophical  system 
are  identical  in  scope  and  content. 

Of  course  the  term  philosophy,  as  a  comprehensive  name  for 
certain  studies,  now  is  usually  employed  to  include  a  number  of 
subordinate  subjects — logic,  ethics,  aesthetics,  the  philosophy  of 
religion,  social  and  political  philosophy.  Until  recently  it  in- 
cluded psychology,  but  the  latter  is  now  generally  regarded  as  a 
more  or  less  independent  discipline.  Every  science  involves 
philosophical  problems,  but  the  above-mentioned  subjects  all  raise, 
in  one  form  or  another,  the  problem  of  values  and  thus  start  meta- 
physical questions  of  central  import. 

Thus  metaphysics  is  the  clearing  house  for  all  fundamental 
philosophical  problems.  It  is  the  comprehensive  discipline  in 
which  all  philosophical  issues  and  theories  converge.  Indeed, 
inasmuch  as  the  special  sciences,  such  as  physics,  biology,  psychol- 
ogy, and  sociology,  set  out  from  unexamined  dogmatic  assump- 
tions and  issue,  severally,  in  various  uncoordinated  results  which 
require  synthesis,  in  order  to  yield  a  consistent  world  view,  to 
metaphysics  belongs  the  twofold  task  of  critically  examining  the 
primary  assumptions  of  the  sciences  and  of  synthesizing  their  con- 
clusions into  a  harmonious  whole.  As  a  critical  inquiry  into  the 
validity,  scope  and  interrelations  of  the  respective  fundamental 
assumptions  and  conclusions  of  the  special  sciences,  metaphysics 
is  the  criticism  of  the  categories,  that  is,  of  the  chief  concepts 
which  man  uses  in  the  ordering  and  mastering  of  experience. 

But  philosophy  is  not  limited  to  the  consideration  of  the  funda- 
mental  problems  of  pure  science.      The  affective  personal   and 


WHAT  IS  METAPHYSICS?  3 

interpersonal  value  attitudes  and  experiences  embodied  in  moral 
and  social  relations,  in  aesthetic  experience  and  religion,  likewise 
involve  philosophical  problems;  especially  when  these  value  atti- 
tudes and  the  beliefs  that  are  basic  to  them  come  into  conflict  with 
scientific  theories.  Thus,  we  find  raised  the  problem  of  the  ulti- 
mate relation  of  existence  and  value — how  far  does  the  course  of 
reality  honor  and  sustain  the  values  that  have  their  immediate 
seat  in  the  life  of  human  personality  ?  To  attempt  to  thresh  out 
such  problems  is  to  embark  on  the  wide  and  stormy  ocean  of  meta- 
physics. 

Metaphysics,  the  heart  of  philosophy,  seeks  by  persistent  reflec- 
■  tion  to  see  things  steadily  and  to  see  them  whole;  in  Goethe's 
words,  "Im  Ganzen,  Guten,  Wahren  resolut  zu  leben."  In  other 
words,  metaphysics  seeks  a  consistent  and  total  interpretation  of 
experience.  It  cannot  be  content  with  any  partial  or  abstract 
view  of  life  and  reality.  A  system  of  philosophy,  or  metaphysics, 
is  a  union  of  a  world  view  and  a  life  view  in  one  harmonious,  com- 
plete, integral  conception.  In  so  far  as  any  man  strives  to  attain, 
by  rational  inquiry,  a  consistent  and  comprehensive  view  of  life 
and  reality,  he  is  a  metaphysician.  The  only  differences  between 
thinking  human  beings  in  this  regard  lie  in  the  persistency,  thor- 
oughness, and  comprehensiveness  with  which  they  pursue  meta- 
physical reflection.  It  follows,  of  course,  in  view  of  the 
fragmentariness  and  the  discordancies  of  our  experiences  and  the 
imperfection  of  our  analysis  and  synthesis  of  the  meanings  of 
experience,  that  metaphysics  must  remain  in  this  life  incomplete. 
Only  a  complete  or  perfect  experience  of  the  universe  would  bring 
to  man  a  complete  metaphysics ;  and  on  the  other  hand,  a  perfect 
experience  would  abolish  the  need  for  metaphysics.  It  is  precisely 
the  fragmentariness  and  inconsistency  in  our  actual  experience 
that  drives  us  into  metaphysics.  As  Mr.  Bradley  has  wittily  said, 
"Metaphysics  consists  in  finding  bad  reasons  for  what  we  believe 
on  instinct.    But  to  find  these  reasons  is  no  less  an  instinct." 

Every  special  science  and  every  special  form  of  practical 
activity  interprets  the  facts  of  experience  from  some  limited  and 
one-sided  or  abstract  point  of  view.  Metaphysics  aims  to  correct 
these  abstractions.  For  example,  the  physicist  and  the  chemist 
assume  the  reality  of  matter,  energy,  space,  motion,  time,  the  uni- 
formity of  causation,  the  mathematical  equivalence  of  causes  and 
effects,  the  correspondence  of  the  mental  categories  of  number  and 


4  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

magnitude  with  the  facts  of  nature.  They  do  not  inquire 
critically  how  far  these  assumptions  may  be  warranted,  or  how 
the  mind  can  know  that  these  so-called  entities  exist  independently 
of  the  mind.  They  do  not  inquire  critically  into  the  relations 
between  our  sense  perceptions  and  matter  and  energy  regarded  as 
permanent  or  substantial  entities.  Even  the  mathematician  usu- 
ally assumes  the  infinitude  of  space,  time  and  number,  without  a 
critical  inquiry  as  to  what  infinitude  may  mean  in  these  relations. 
The  physicist  and  the  chemist  employ  the  doctrine  of  the  conser- 
vation of  energy  without  stopping  to  ask  how  this  principle  is  to  be 
squared  with  the  infinite  duration  of  the  universe,  the  second  law 
of  thermo-dynamics,  the  apparently  creative  character  of  the 
evolutional  life  process,  the  belief  in  human  personality  and  free- 
dom. A  biologist  may  assume  the  uniqueness  of  the  life  processes 
without  raising  the  question  how  this  uniqueness  comports  with 
the  mechanistic  conception  of  the  universe.  Or  a  biologist  may 
conduct  his  inquiries  on  the  assumption  that  there  is  no  difference 
between  vital  processes  and  mechanical  processes,  without  stopping 
to  inquire  how  the  reduction  of  life  to  mechanism  affects  the 
position  of  human  thought  and  human  values  in  the  world.  A 
psychologist  may  study  the  conscious  behavior  of  human  beings  and 
the  relations  of  conscious  behavior  to  unconscious  behavior.  He 
may  treat  the  mind  as  a  mere  mechanism  differing  only  in  com- 
plexity from  a  crystal,  for  example,  summarily  dismissing  the  self 
or  personality  from  court  in  any  other  sense  than  that  of  a  physico- 
chemical  mechanism.  A  sociologist  may  assume  that  the  individ- 
ual's character  and  actions  are  the  joint  products  of  the  physical 
and  social  environment;  ignoring  the  problems  of  individuality, 
responsibility,  freedom  and  creativeness ;  whereas  the  moral  agent, 
the  teacher,  the  judge,  the  social  administrator,  assumes  as  his 
working  hypothesis  responsibility  and  freedom. 

When  man  as  a  reflective  being  stops  to  take  stock  of  the  uni- 
verse as  a  whole,  of  himself  as  a  whole  and  of  his  place  in  the 
universe,  he  cannot  be  satisfied  with  jarring  assumptions  and 
doctrines.  He  must  ask  himself,  "Am  I  really  only  a  bit  of 
cunning  mechanism  which  has  just  chanced  to  occur  as  one  of  the 
infinite  number  of  possible  permutations  and  combinations  of  mass 
particles  in  a  blind  and  meaningless  process  of  things?  Is  my 
belief  that  I  am  a  self-determining  rational  agent,  an  utter  illusion ; 
and  if  so,  how  could  this  illusion  have  arisen  ?    Are  the  values,  in 


WHAT  IS  METAPHYSICS?  5 

the  seeking  and  achieving  of  which  I  seem  to  be  satisfying  the 
deepest  instincts  of  my  being — the  values  of  knowing  and  contem- 
plating the  spectacle  of  things,  of  creating  and  enjoying  beauty, 
inner  harmony  and  social  harmony,  the  values  of  adding  to  the 
sum  of  knowledge  and  beauty,  of  the  communion  of  souls  in 
friendship  and  love,  of  loyalty  to  noble  causes,  of  that  communion 
with  the  nature  of  things  which  is  religion  at  its  highest — are  all 
these  values  illusory  and  transitory  by-products  of  the  insensate 
mechanism  of  the  universe  ? 

A  man  may  be  a  fairly  good  workman  in  field  or  factory  or 
counting  house,  he  may  be  a  reputable  citizen  and  a  decent  husband 
and  father,  he  may  be  even  a  faithful  pedestrian  worker  in  science, 
without  raising  these  questions.  But  if  he  lift  his  nose  from  the 
grindstone  of  his  daily  tasks  to  ask  himself  what  is  the  good,  what 
is  the  meaning,  wherein  consist  the  value  and  dignity  of  human 
life,  he  cannot  help  asking  such  questions.  If  he  be  content  with  a 
treadmill  existence  all  his  days,  he  need  not  philosophize.  But  if 
he  raise  the  inner  eye  of  thought  to  contemplate,  however  inter- 
mittently, the  nature  of  his  being,  the  meaning  of  the  sum  of  things, 
and  to  consider  his  own  place  and  destiny  therein,  he  thereby 
becomes  a  metaphysician.  Hence  the  perennial  interest  and  justi- 
fication of  metaphysics.  One  need  not  think  seriously  or 
obstinately  in  regard  to  the  fundamental  problems  of  human  exist- 
ence ;  but,  if  one  wishes  reflectively  to  apprehend  the  meaning  of 
human  life  and  its  place  in  the  world,  one  must  enter  upon  the 
pathway  of  metaphysical  inquiry.  For  a  whole  nest  of  unques- 
tioned assumptions  and  beliefs  is  concealed  not  only  in  everyday 
practical  knowledge  and  religious  attitudes,  but  as  well  in  the  pro- 
cedures and  conclusions  of  the  various  sciences.  Every  science  and 
every  form  of  practical  activity  is  a  special  and  abstract  or  one- 
sided way  of  dealing  with  the  field  of  experience  and  reality. 
Every  special  science  and  practical  activity  involves  assumptions 
or  theories  as  to  the  meaning  and  place  of  its  particular  data,  con- 
cepts and  interests  in  the  whole  system  of  reality.  Metaphysics 
corrects  the  abstractness  and  the  inconsistency  of  these  special 
assumptions  and  beliefs  by  aiming  at  the  most  complete  and  most 
consistent  reflective  interpretation  of  experience  in  its  totality. 
Naive  thought  and  belief,  and  science,  which  is  a  more  rigorous 
analysis  of  special  aspects  of  naive  thought,  are  fragmentary  and 
sometimes  internally  inconsistent  in  their  results.     The  rational 


6  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

impulse  impels  us  towards  a  coherent  world  view,  which  shall  be 
at  the  same  time  a  coherent  life  view.  The  one  commonjpresup- 
position  of  rational  living  and  of  philosophy-  is~tEaTTEe  universe  is 

in  Bomftjignsfl   a,  pnsmns;   nn   nrdp.rly  nr  intelligi'Klp.  who/lft.      Meta- 

\  I  /  "physics  asks  whether  this  presupposition  be  justifiable.  In  our 
quest  for  a  comprehensive  and  harmonious  view  we  may  have  to 
put  up  with  serious  gaps.  We  may  be  able  to  discover  only 
broken  glimpses  of  thp  iiriivprsflT  nfrTftry"TriTF;"  sinppTFvft^iliiTnfltft 
consistence  or  coherence  of  reality  and  its  harmony  with  the  gen- 

■ ei'ai^tructufe'of  human  thought  are  postulates  which  gain  better 

■ w^TrarrHh^rmoTe^we^rylo^^ 

*"lt71heTnelaphyyiTjal~e^erprise  is  justified.  Since" the  realm  of 
" — experience  i^aTmany^Eued process,  one  mustTnot  expect  to  secure 
a  world  view  cheaply,  and  the  outline  sketch  of  reality  which  meta- 
physics may  afford  will  doubtless  seem  colorless  and  lifeless  by 
contrast  with  the  vivid  hues  of  concrete  experience.  "Grau, 
theurer  Freund,  ist  alle  Theorie,  und  griin  des  Lebens  goldner 
Baum."  But  at  least  one  may  hope  to  attain  the  satisfaction  of 
knowing  more  clearly  where  one  stands  in  regard  both  to  the  trust- 
worthiness, the  limitations  and  the  implications  of  human  experi- 
ence and  deed.  And  no  clear  or  consistent  notions  are  attainable 
on  these  points  without  metaphysics. 

II.  The  Method  of  Metaphysics 

Metaphysics  takes  its  point  of  departure  from  the  nature  of 
human  experience  as  a  whole.  Its  methods  are  the  analysis  of 
experience  in  its  totality  in  order  to  determine  its  main  features 
and  their  interconnections;  and  the  synthesis  of  the  results  of 
analysis  into  a  consistent  and  comprehensive  conception  of  the 
meanings  and  implications  of  experience.  Metaphysics  can  be  a 
genuine  intellectual  procedure  only  in  so  far  as  it  draws  from 
actual  experience  and  finds  in  actual  experience  the  justification 
for  its  constructive  work.  Experience  is  always  in  flux  and  is 
fragmentary.  Thought  is  impelled,  when  it  is  thoroughgoing,  to 
comprehend  the  flux  and  to  piece  out  the  fragments  into  a  har- 
monious whole.  Every  serious  attempt  to  do  this  is  a  metaphysics. 
The  philosopher  is  justified,  since  he  is  compelled  by  the  urge  of 
thought,  in  transcending  actual  experience  in  order  to  render  com- 
plete and  coherent  the  implications  thereof.     The  problem  as  to 


WHAT  IS  METAPHYSICS?  7 

how  far,  and  in  what  directions,  the  philosopher  is  warranted  in 
transcending  the  actual  can  only  be  solved  by  the  whole  course  of 
metaphysical  inquiry ;  but,  in  view  of  the  impermanence  of  experi- 
ence and  the  immense  difficulties  which  confront  the  attempt  to 
make  it  consistent  in  implication,  only  partial  success  can  be  ex- 
pected in  this  undertaking.  "All  things  excellent  are  as  difficult  as 
they  are  rare" ;  and  this  most  excellent  of  things  is  most  difficult. 
Often  the  claim  is  put  forward  that  there  is  some  peculiar 
method  by  which  the  problems  of  metaphysics  are  solved.  M. 
Bergson  has  argued  for  the  method  of  intuition  or  direct  vision  of 
life  as  the  key  to  the  solution  of  metaphysical  questions,  in  contrast 
with  the  geometrizing  and  mechanizing  procedure  of  the  intellect. 
We  shall  examine  this  doctrine  fully  later  on.  Suffice  it  to  say  now 
that  vision,  feeling  or  direct  experience,  without  interpretation,  is 
neither  science  nor  philosophy ;  and  that  any  proposal  which  would 
brush  aside  the  tested  methods  by  which  the  thought  of  mankind 
has  advanced  steadily,  if  slowly,  is  suspect.  Fichte  and  Hegel 
employed  the  dialectic  method.  Briefly,  this  consists  in  finding  in 
the  development  and  overcoming  of  oppositions  or  contradictions 
in  thought  the  key  to  the  conception  of  reality  as  the  absolute  and 
harmonious  and  living  synthesis  in  which  all  oppositions  are  taken 
up  and  reconciled,  all  contradictions  healed.  Undoubtedly  the  aim 
of  metaphysics  is  the  resolution  of  all  oppositions,  the  annulment 
of  all  contradictions  in  a  harmonious  totality  of  insight.  But  this 
ideal  does  not  give  to  the  dialectic  method  the  prerogative  of  being 
the  method  of  philosophy.  Its  advocates  have  found  their  cue  in 
the  development  of  conscious  selfhood  and  the  social  and  spiritual 
development  of  mankind.  To  apply  the  dialectic  method  to  the 
interpretation  of  nature,  as  well  as  of  human  culture,  is  to  assume 
that  the  whole  reality  is  the  evolution  of  selfhood  or  personality. 
It  is  to  assume  the  fundamental  doctrine  of  metaphysical  idealism 
or  spiritualism.  There  may  be  grounds  for  regarding  the  develop- 
ment of  selfhood  as  the  most  important  clew  to  the  meaning  and 
purpose  of  reality.  But  the  philosopher  has  no  right  to  begin  with 
such  an  assumption,  nor  even  to  assume  that  dialectical  evolution 
furnishes  a  sufficient  key  to  the  nature  and  destiny  of  spirit  or 
personality.  We  shall  find  occasion  later,  in  connection  with  the 
study  of  personality,  to  consider  more  fully  the  meaning  and  value 
of  the  dialectical  method.  Suffice  it  to  say  now  that  we  cannot 
accept  it  as  the  method  of  philosophy  or  metaphysics,  since  it  is 


8  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

not  relevant  to  the  many  other  problems  which  belong  to  our  study. 
If  we  could  begin  with  the  proposition  that  nothing  is  real  except 
spirit  or  conscious  selfhood,  we  might  seriously  consider  whether 
we  should  not  proceed  wholly  by  the  dialectic  method.  But  we 
must  begin  with  the  obvious  assumption  that  experience  is  the  basis 
of  metaphysics ;  and  it  is  by  no  means  self-evident  that  experience 
not  only  is  always  owned  by  selves,  but  is  of  nothing  except  selves. 
Truly  experience  implies  that  I  am  as  an  experient,  but  it  does 
not  necessarily  follow  that  whatever  I  experience  is  spirit  and 
nothing  but  spirit. 

"There  is  experience,"  and  "I,  whatever  else  I  may  be,  am  an 
experiencing  and  thinking  being" — such  are  the  inevitable  and 
indubitable  propositions  from  which  the  metaphysician  must  start. 
He  may  doubt  everything  further — how  experience  comes  to  him, 
what  it  signifies,  what  more  he  himself  is,  whether  there  is  any 
other  self,  whether  anything  is  permanent,  whether  perhaps  the 
world  of  his  experience  is  not  a  dream  and  he  the  only  dreamer, 
but  he  cannot  doubt  that  he,  the  experient  of  the  movement,  is 
having  experience  and  thinking  about  its  meaning.  In  order  to 
get  forward  he  must  analyze  his  experience  to  find  what  it  con- 
tains and  implies  and  then  put  together  the  results  of  his  analysis. 
He  must,  as  Descartes  put  it,  analyze  the  complex  data  into  the 
simplest  attainable,  begin  with  the  simplest  and  most  obvious,  pro- 
ceed step  by  step  and  make  sure  that  nothing  has  been  omitted. 
Intellectual  analysis  of  the  data,  inductive  generalization  there- 
from, and  deductive  synthesis  checked  up  by  further  analysis  of 
data — such  are  the  elements  of  genuine  intellectual  procedure  in 
every  field.  And  such  are  the  elements  of  philosophical  method. 
The  only  important  difference  between  science  and  metaphysics, 
with  regard  to  method  and  scope,  is  this — metaphysics  is  an  analy- 
sis of  the  widest  or  most  general  inductions  of  experience  and  a 
synthesis  of  these  into  a  coherent  system  of  thought,  whereas  a 
special  science  limits  itself  to  an  analysis  and  synthesis  of  some 
particular  aspect  of  experience,  such  as  measurable,  ponderable 
and  experimentable  physical  qualities,  or  the  phenomena  of  living 
matter,  or  the  social  behavior  of  human  beings. 

In  the  metaphysical  analysis  of  experience  the  problem  of 
knowledge  has  come,  in  modern  times,  to  occupy  a  central  and 
determining  place.  The  rapid  change  and  increase  in  special 
scientific  theory  of  nature  and  man,  in  sharp  contrast  and  often  in 


WHAT  IS  METAPHYSICS?  9 

contradiction  with  man's  naive  and  traditional  beliefs  in  regard  to 
his  own  nature,  vocation  and  destiny,  has  made  the  problem  of 
truth  an  acute  and  critical  one  for  the  determination  of  man's  place 
in  the  universe.  Consequently  I  shall  approach  the  other  main 
problems  of  metaphysics  through  the  problem  of  knowledge.  It  is 
impossible  to  progress  rationally  in  the  consideration  of  the  nature 
of  personality  and  values,  and  their  place  in  the  world  order,  and 
with  the  problem  of  the  structure  and  the  meaning  of  reality  as  a 
whole  without  settling  accounts  with  the  problem  of  knowledge. 
On  the  other  hand  knowledge  is  only  one  function  of  personality. 
In  the  actual  movement  of  reflective  life  it  is  interwoven  with  feel- 
ings and  valuations,  with  impulses  and  volitions.  The  world  that 
I  must  start  with  is  the  world  of  my  own  experience.  But  I  do 
not  reflect  this  world  passively  as  a  colorless  knower,  or  even 
actively  grind  it  into  categories  like  a  logical  machine.  I  feel  its 
sting  and  sweetness,  I  react  to  its  impacts  and  solicitations  at  the 
same  time  that  I  try  to  understand  it.  No  theory  of  man's  nature 
and  his  place  in  reality  can  be  adequate  which  treats  these  various 
aspects  of  the  concrete  and  living  movement  of  individual  experi- 
ence in  isolation  from  one  another,  or  which  elevates  one  aspect  to 
a  privileged  position  by  ignoring  the  others.  I  shall,  perforce,  for 
purposes  of  discussion,  have  to  isolate  knowledge,  valuation,  and 
volition.  But  the  reader  is  asked  to  bear  in  mind  that  this  is  an 
artificial  isolation  for  purposes  of  investigation. 

Experience,  as  the  primary  datum  of  metaphysics,  is  always 
individual — yours  or  mme.  The  individual's  experience  is  the 
window  through  which  he  views  reality,  or  perhaps  better,  the  point 
at  which  reality  acts  on  him  and  he  reacts  on  it.  Whatever  con- 
clusion one  may  reach  as  to  the  dependence  of  the  individual 
experient  and  agent  on  the  world  (inclusive  of  the  physical  order 
and  other  selves)  can  be  valid  only  if  it  takes  account  of  the  indi- 
viduated character  of  experience. 

There  are  various  ways  of  approach  to  the  central  problems  of 
metaphysics.  One  might  begin  from  any  of  the  starting  points 
aforementioned.  One  might  begin  with  the  ultimate  problems  of 
the  physical  order  and  of  natural  science  (metaphysics  of  nature), 
or  of  the  mental  order  and  psychology  (metaphysics  of  psychology), 
or  of  ethics,  aesthetics  and  religion  (metaphysics  of  values),  or  of 
the  place  of  knowledge  in  reality  (epistemology).  I  have  chosen  to 
begin  with  the  latter  problems,  to  proceed  from  them  to  the  prob- 


10  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

lems  of  the  general  structure  of  the  physical  order,  then  to  the 
problems  of  self  and  of  values,  or  metaphysics  of  personality  and 
of  society,  concluding  with  the  problems  of  general  metaphysics 
or  cosmology,  that  is,  of  the  meaning  of  reality  as  a  whole.  I 
have  dealt  with  the  problems  of  the  philosophy  of  nature,  i.e.,  of 
the  metaphysics  of  physics  and  biology,  only  as  incidental  to  the 
carrying  out  of  my  purpose.  I  have  not  aimed  at  a  complete  treat- 
ment of  all  metaphysical  questions.  My  aim  is  rather  to  discuss 
the  main  problems  and  theories  in  the  light  of  the  central  problems 
of  personality  and  values. 

I  have  described  the  aim  of  metaphysics  to  be  the  attainment 
of  a  synthetic  or  synoptic  interpretation  of  the  meaning  of  experi- 
ence in  its  wholeness.  To  me  the  classical  tradition  in  philosophy 
is  essentially  right  in  regarding  the  heart  of  philosophy  to  be  the 
striving  for  a  coherent  and  adequate  conception  of  reality  as  a 
whole.  And  such  a  conception  is  to  be  attained  by  the  analytical 
interrogation  of  all  the  main  aspects  of  human  experience  and  the 
synthetic  organization  into  a  coherent  conception  of  the  results  of 
analysis.  I  do  not  pretend  to  any  acquaintance  with  a  reality  that 
may  exist  as  such,  apart  and  entirely  different  from  our  human 
world.  The  only  world  concerning  which  I  have  any  knowledge  is 
the  world  of  experience  that  is  revealed  to  and  vn  human  selves. 
This  world  is  what  it  is  through  the  reactions  of  selves  to  the  com- 
mon physical  conditions  of  their  existence.  As  an  individual  self 
I  am  constrained  to  recognize  that  my  experience,  both  active  and 
passive,  is  conditioned  by  qualities  of  which  I  must  take  account. 
These  qualities  are  physical.  Moreover,  inasmuch  as  I  am  a  social 
being,  one  who  experiences  and  acts  only  as  a  member  of  a  com- 
munity of  selves,  I  am  led  to  recognize  that  physical  qualities  are 
objective  to  the  community  no  less  than  to  me  as  an  individual. 
But  human  feelings  and  strivings,  human  values  and  purposes,  hu- 
man thoughts  and  human  acts,  are  just  as  real  parts  of  the  world  of 
experience  as  are  physical  qualities.  I  hold,  therefore,  that  no  phil- 
osophical account  of  the  world  is  complete  which  ignores  the  prob- 
lems of  the  meaning  and  place  in  reality  of  human  values  and  pur- 
poses, human  thoughts  and  acts.  The  central  problem  of  philosophy 
or  metaphysics,  the  one  problem  into  which  all  other  problems  merge, 
is  the  nature  of  human  personality  and  its  place  in  the  universe. 

The  above  conception  of  the  function  and  method  of  systematic 
philosophy  is  contested  by  some  members  of  a  vigorous  and  impor- 


WHAT  IS  METAPHYSICS?  11 

tant  school  of  present  day  thought — the  new  realists.  The  writers 
of  this  school  by  no  means  agree  among  themselves.  I  shall  take 
Mr.  Bertrand  Russell  as  the  most  vigorous  and  interesting  exponent 
of  the  neorealistic  conception.  His  views  are  clearly  expressed  in 
his  books — Mysticism  and  Logic  and  Our  Knowledge  of  the  Ex- 
ternal World.1  Mr.  Russell  holds  that  philosophy  has  gone  astray 
hitherto  by  attempting  to  find  satisfaction  for  human  desires,  by 
peeking  to  show  that  human  values  have  some  standing  in  the 
universe;  in  other  words  by  seeking  a  cosmical  justification  of 
man's  longing  for  the  satisfaction  of  his  desires  for  happiness  and 
for  some  lasting  good.  This  philosophical  attitude  he  calls  mysti- 
cism. It  has  resulted  in  repeated  and  vain  attempts  at  synthetic 
views  of  reality,  in  "large  untested  generalities  recommended  only 
by  a  certain  appeal  to  the  imagination."  Mr.  Russell  would 
banish  the  problem  of  values  from  philosophy.  The  latter  must 
become  ethically  neutral;  must  dissociate  itself  entirely  from 
ethics  and  religion,  and  align  itself  with  the  standpoint  and 
method  of  science.  The  only  fruitful  method  for  philosophy  is  the 
logical  analysis  of  familiar  but  complex  things.  Let  it  have  done 
with  the  vain  question  as  to  the  nature  of  reality  as  a  whole  and 
confine  itself  to  the  logical  analysis  of  such  problems  as  the  nature 
of  thought,  of  judgment,  belief  and  inference,  in  the  abstract,  and 
the  nature  of  our  knowledge  of  the  external  world.  Philosophy  is 
identical  with  Logic,  "the  science  of  the  possible/*  It  is  concerned 
only  with  the  universal  propositions  of  abstract  or  symbolic  logic, 
with  logical  forms  and  their  relations.  Logic,  says  Mr.  Russell, 
consists  of  two  parts.  "The  first  part  investigates  what  proposi- 
tions are  and  what  forms  they  may  have ;  the  second  part  consists 
of  certain  supremely  general  propositions,  which  assert  the  truth 
of  all  propositions  of  certain  forms."  2 

In  reply  I  would  point  out  that  while  philosophy  begins  with 
analysis — the  analysis  of  human  experience  in  its  most  general 
aspects — its  goal  is  a  rational  synthesis.  I  contest  the  view  that 
the  special  sciences  are  purely  analytical.  They  begin  with  the 
analysis  of  special  aspects  of  the  empirical  world.  But  synthesis 
goes  hand  in  hand  with  analysis,  in  science  no  less  than  in  philos- 
ophy.    The  aim  of  biology,  physics  or  chemistry  is,  by  patient 

1  See  especially  Lectures  1  and  ii  in  Our  Knowledge  of  the  External  World, 
and  the  Essays  entitled  "Mysticism  and  Logic,"  and  "On  Scientific  Method 
in  Philosophy." 

'Our  Knowledge  of  the  External  World,  p.  57. 


12  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

analysis,  to  arrive  at  some  wide-reaching  generalization  which 
organizes  into  a  coherent  system  the  facts  discovered  by  analysis. 
The  synthesis  may  not  be  final ;  it  may  require  revision,  but  it  is  a 
fruitful  and  stimulating  instrument  for  further  inquiry  no  less 
than  it  is  a  systematic  comprehension  of  already  ascertained  facts. 
Where  would  biology  be  to-day  without  the  principle  of  natural 
selection  or  of  adaptation  ?  Where  would  physics  be  without  the 
principle  of  gravitation  or  of  the  conservation  of  energy?  Or 
chemistry  without  the  periodic  law  ?  Is  not  Einstein's  theory  of 
relativity  a  vast  synthesis  which  is  provoking  fresh  analyses  ?  The 
progress  of  every  special  science  involves  partial  and  provisional 
syntheses.  Philosophy  or  metaphysics  is  the  endeavor  after  a 
comprehensive  synthesis. 

Philosophy  is  not  the  science  of  the  possible,  it  is  the  science 
of  the  real,  that  is  of  the  actual  and  the  ideal  in  their  relations. 
For  ideas  and  ideals  are  real;  values  and  purposes  are  real  and 
efficacious.  Man's  social,  ethical,  affectional,  aesthetic  and  religious 
valuations  are  just  as  good  facts,  in  the  empirical  sense,  as  are 
inertia,  electricity,  or  light  in  the  physical  order ;  and  the  former 
order  of  facts  plays  an  even  larger  role  in  human  life  than  the 
latter.  Any  procedure  which  would  rule  out  from  the  court  of 
philosophy  the  consideration  of  personal  life  and  its  values  is  very 
one-sided.  Indeed,  all  the  sciences,  in  their  origin  and  develop- 
ment, are  the  products  of  the  human  quest  for  the  satisfaction  of 
values.  Mathematics  and  physics,  no  less  than  art,  poetry  and 
religion,  result  from  man's  insatiable  desire  to  realize  his  spiritual 
life  by  attuning  his  personality  to  the  order  of  the  universe.  Even 
Mr.  Russell  proclaims  the  joyous  satisfactions  of  creating  and  con- 
templating the  beautiful  realm  of  clear  and  distinct,  well-ordered, 
precise,  and  eternally  stable  logical  entities,  in  contrast  with  the 
heartless  and  confused  world  of  brute  matter.  His  science  of  the 
possible,  like  the  world  of  the  musician,  affords  his  spirit  a  refuge 
from  this  troubled  empirical  world.  It  is  the  creation  of  a  unique 
and  gifted  spirit.  It  satisfies  a  desire  which  is  caviar  to  the 
general.    He  is  a  logical  mystic. 

If  man  and  his  values  are  utterly  incongruous  with  the  nature 
of  the  universe,  as  Mr.  Russell  maintains,3  we  are  indeed  in  a 
paradoxical  situation.  Man  is  that  part  of  nature,  that  focus  in 
the  natural  order,  in  which  the  creative  energies  of  nature  "come 

•See  "The  Free  Man's  Worship"  in  Mysticism  and  Logic. 


WHAT  IS  METAPHYSICS?  13 

alive,"  as  Mr.  Bosanquet  puts  it.  In  man  nature  or  the  universe 
comes  to  valuing  and  purposive  consciousness;  in  man  nature 
attains  to  effective  and  significant  individuality.  How  then  can 
man  be  an  utter  alien,  a  homeless  excrescence,  an  unaccountable 
eruption,  in  the  universe  which  has  borne  him?  Either  human 
nature  in  its  totality  is  a  genuine  key  to  the  nature  of  things,  or 
the  universe  is  cut  in  two  with  a  hatchet.  In  the  present  work  it 
will  be  maintained  that  human  experience  means  a  dynamic  and 
fruitful  intercourse  between  man  and  the  world,  that  reality 
acquires  meaning  and  value  in  his  life,  and  conversely,  that  mean- 
ing and  value  inhere  in  reality.  In  order  to  be  just  to  the  full 
meaning  of  human  experience  microscopic  analysis  must  be  taken 
up  into  an  imaginative  synthesis.  The  philosopher  is  required  to  be 
ethically  neutral  in  the  sense  of  being  as  objective  and  open-minded 
as  possible.  But  experience  is  not  neutral;  and  as  for  a  neutral 
thinker — "there  is  no  such  animal,"  not  even  Mr.  Bertrand  Russell. 


APPENDIX 

PHENOMENOLOGY  AS  THE  SCIENCE  OF  PURE  CONSCIOUSNESS 

Professor  Edmund  Husserl,  in  a  series  of  works,4  claims  to  lay 
the  foundation  of  philosophy  as  a  strict  science  and,  for  the  first 
time,  to  formulate  the  methods  and  map  out  the  way  by  which  alone 
philosophy  can  proceed  on  the  certain  path  of  science.  In  view  of 
this  claim  (which  recalls  Kant's  similar  claim)  and  of  the  acute 
elaboration  and  voluminousness  of  Husserl's  work  (the  works 
enumerated  total  nearly  fourteen  hundred  large  octavo  pages),  it 
seems  desirable  to  take  some  account  of  it  here.  Besides  his  own 
immediate  disciples  and  collaborators,  Husserl  has  influenced  the 
psychologists,  Th.  Lipps  and  0.  Kiilpe  and  his  school,5  as  well  as  a 
number  of  other  philosophers  and  psychologists. 

4  Logische  Untersuchungen,  second  revised  edition,  Erster  Band  und 
Zweiter  Band,  i  Teil,  1913;  Zweiter  Band,  ii  Teil,  1921:  Ideen  zu  einer 
reinen  Phanomenologie  und  phdnomenologischen  Philosophie  in  Jahrbuch  fur 
Philosophie  und  phanomenologische  Forschung  (edited  by  Husserl  in  coopera- 
tion with  M.  Geiger,  A.  Pfander,  A.  Keinach  and  M.  Scheler),  Erster  Band, 
Teil  i,  1913,  also  Sonderabdruck,  1913;  and  Philosophie  als  strenge  Wissen- 
schaft,  in  Logos,  Vol.  I. 

8  Cf.  the  brief  but  remarkably  thorough  survey  of  this  psychological  move- 
ment by  E.  B.  Titchener  in  the  American  Journal  of  Psychology,  "Vol.  33,  No.  i, 
pp.  43-84.  The  whole  movement  has  its  source  in  Franz  Brentano,  Psychologie 
vom  empirischen  Standpunkte,  Band  i,  1874.  Titchener  calls  it,  happily,  ■ '  The 
Psychology  of  Act." 


14  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

Husserl  opens  his  Logische  Untersuchungen6  with  a  vigorous  and 
effective  polemic  against  "Psychologism,"  by  which  is  meant  the 
standpoint  of  those  who  would  ground  the  validity  of  logical  prin- 
ciples solely  on  the  mental  processes  of  human  beings.  This  attitude, 
argues  Husserl,  reduces  all  science  to  mere  subjective  empirical  prob- 
ability and  does  not  afford  even  a  mathematical  foundation  for  a 
theory  of  probability.  Pure  logic  is  the  exposition  of  the  essences  or 
universal  forms  that  every  theoretical  science  necessarily  possesses. 
Thus  pure  logic  is  the  purely  formal  (eidetic)  science  which  deals 
with  the  a  priori  forms  which  are  the  ideal  presuppositions  of  all 
possible  science.  But  it  is  not  methodology;  it  is  not  concerned  with 
the  ideal  conditions  of  the  empirical  sciences.  It  deals  with  the 
"universals"  or  "meanings"  of  pure  thought.  It  is  the  "theory  of 
theories"  or  theory  of  knowledge.  The  objects  of  thought,  whether 
actually  embodied  as  are  the  objects  of  physical  or  psychological  sci- 
ence, or  ideal  as  are  the  objects  of  mathematics  or  ethical  valuation, 
have  a  being  or  validity  independent  of  empirically  conditioned  psy- 
chical processes.  Thus  Husserl  opposes  a  outrance  all  forms  of  sub- 
jectivism, mentalism  or  "phenomenalism"  in  the  usual  sense  of  the 
latter  term.7  Husserl's  epistemological  standpoint  has  some  affinities 
with  the  American  and  English  Neo-realists,  although  I  should 
expect  his  metaphysical  standpoint  to  be  quite  different.  There  is 
even  more  affinity  between  Husserl  and  Meinong's  Gegenstands- 
theorie. 

Husserl's  conception  of  phenomenology  is  radically  different  from 
that  of  Hegel.  The  latter  is  a  culture-psychological  interpretation 
of  the  development  of  mind,  in  which  the  epochs  in  the  historical 
development  of  culture  are  interwoven  with  the  theory  of  the  devel- 
opment of  the  individual  mind.  In  Hegel's  own  terms,  the  meaning 
of  "subjective  mind"  is  interpreted  in  terms  of  "objective  mind" 
(social  mind).  Phenomenology,  for  Husserl,  is  the  purely  descrip- 
tive analysis  of  vital  experience  (Erlebniss)  from  the  standpoint  of 
consciousness  in  general  or  pure  consciousness.  Husserl  uniformly 
uses  the  term  Erlebniss  rather  than  Erfahrung;  I  suppose  since  the 
latter  term,  like  its  English  equivalent,  is  empiristic  and  even  sen- 
sationalists in  implication ;  it  might  be  "neutral,"  that  is,  not  imply 
a  subject;  as  indeed  it  does  not  in  Avenarius,  James  and  the  neutral 
monists  who  follow  him  (B.  Russell  is  now  to  be  counted  among  the 


•Hereafter  the  Logische  Untersuchungen  will  be  referred  to  as  L.  V.  and 
the  Ideen  zu  einer  reinen  Phanomenologie  as  Ideen. 

* M.  Scheler  has,  in  the  Jahrbuch,  Bande  i  and  ii,  a  very  fine  treatment 
of  the  problems  of  ethics — Der  Formalismus  in  der  Ethik  und  die  Materiale 
Wertethik;  A.  Pfander  in  Band  iv  a  fine  treatment  of  logic. 


WHAT  IS  METAPHYSICS?  15 

neutral  monists;  see  his  Analysis  of  Mind).  The  distinction  between 
the  popular  sense  of  experience  and  the  phenomenological  sense  ia 
that  in  the  popular  mind  experience  is  not  psychical,  says  Husserl. 
While,  for  sake  of  brevity,  I  shall  translate  "Erlebniss"  by  "Experi- 
ence," let  it  be  borne  in  mind  that  Husserl  means  by  it  "vital  ex- 
perience," "consciousness"  and  that,  for  him,  this  implies  always  a 
subject  or  "pure  ego."  The  relation  between  the  subject  of  experience 
and  the  empirical  self  or  personality  has  not,  thus  far,  been  discussed 
fully  by  Husserl.  I  imagine  he  would  be  prepared  to  say  that  the 
self  has  some  sort  of  enduring  reality.  I  base  this  surmise  on  certain 
remarks  inter  alia  in  the  Ideen.  While  in  the  L.  U.  Husserl  rejected 
the  pure  ego  as  a  superfluity  and  regarded  the  phenomenological 
ego  as  nothing  more  than  the  experienced  interconnections  in  the 
content  of  consciousness  or  empirical  unity  of  consciousness,  in  the 
Ideen  he  accepts  the  pure  ego  as  the  implicate  of  all  acts.  The  world 
has  a  presumptive  reality,  the  ego  has  absolute  reality  (Ideen,  p. 
86).  By  itself  the  ego  is  indescribable;  nevertheless  it  is  present  in 
every  mental  act.  But,  at  the  start,  phenomonology  can  leave  the 
ego  out  of  consideration  and  begin  with  the  fundamental  fact  that 
"every  experience  of  the  stream  (of  consciousness),  that  the  reflective 
look  may  probe  into,  has  its  own  unique  essence  which  can  be  intui- 
tively apprehended,  a  content  that  can  be  regarded  in  its  own  unique- 
ness." 

The  method  of  phenomenology  is  "immanent  inspection,"  the 
contemplation  of  essence  (Wesenerschauung) ;  it  apprehends  and 
analyzes  the  data  of  consciousness  by  reflective  intuition;  it  is  the 
universal  eidetic  science,  the  science  of  the  forms  or  essences  of  pure 
consciousness  as  revealed  by  an  analysis  of  the  acts  of  the  ego.  Phe- 
nomenology brackets  (einhlammert)  all  empirical  data  and  the  special 
sciences  which  deal  therewith.  It  is  not  concerned  with  the  tran- 
scendent or  metaphysical  reality  of  the  physical  or  psychical  or  their 
relations.  It  deals  with  the  immediate  and  immanent  data  of  pure 
consciousness.  Like  geometry,  in  the  special  field  of  space  relations, 
phenomenology,  as  the  universal  science  of  thought-forms,  cares  not 
for  "existents";  its  concern  is  with  essences  alone. 

Starting  from  the  naive  world  view  phenomenology  reduces  or 
brackets,  by  elimination  (Auschaltung) ,  the  specific  individuations 
of  particular  fields  of  experience  and  thought,  even  of  mathematics; 
what  is  left  is  the  "absolute  or  transcendental  consciousness"  which 
is  not  an  empirical  reality.  Phenomenology  describes  the  essences 
or  universal  forms  and  connections  of  pure  consciousness.  In  so  doing 
it  makes  use  of  the  eliminated  elements  as  examples,  but  without 
reference  to  their  "reality."    Thus  it  is  not  concerned  with  the  ques- 


16  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

tion  of  the  ultimate  nature  of  physical  things,  animal  life,  or  the 
empirical  self  or  with  the  metaphysical  status  of  values.  It  abstracts 
from  the  fact  that  consciousness  inhabits  animal  bodies  which  are 
in  interaction  with  other  bodies.  It  takes  account  only  of  phenomenal 
time  and  space,  that  is,  of  time  and  space  as  forms  of  consciousness. 
It  does  not,  of  course,  deny  that  there  are  cosmic  time  and  space ;  but 
the  problem  of  the  relation  between  phenomenal  and  cosmic  or 
objective  time  and  space  belongs  to  metaphysics,  just  as  do  the  prob- 
lems of  the  nature  of  the  physical  world  and  the  relation  of  the 
physical,  the  psychical  and  the  value  realms.  Phenomenology  is 
logically  preliminary  to  the  special  sciences  as  well  as  to  logic,  to  the 
philosophy  of  values  and  of  culture,  and  of  course,  to  metaphysics. 
Husserl  means,  by  the  assertion  that  phenomenology  is  the  indis- 
pensable precondition  of  philosophy  as  a  science,  that  its  thorough 
descriptive  analysis  must  precede  all  theory  of  science,  ethics,  meta- 
physics and  the  philosophy  of  culture  (philosophies  of  the  state, 
religion,  art,  etc.).  With  especial  reference  to  metaphysics  the  fol- 
lowing statement  is  significant:  "The  world  is  never  experienced  by 
the  thinker.  Experience  is  that  which  means  the  world;  the  world 
itself  is  the  intended  object"  (L.  TJ.,  Vol.  II,  Chap.  2,  p.  387). 
"Consciousness  means  beyond  the  actually  experienced"  (op.  cit.,  p. 
41).  "The  thing  transcends  perception"  (Ideen,  p.  75).  "There  is 
a  fundamental  difference  between  being  as  experience  and  being  as 
thing"  (Ideen,  p.  75).  The  external  object  is  not  immanent  in 
consciousness.  What  exist  in  experience  are  nuances,  adumbrations 
or  modifications  (Abschattungen)  of  an  object.  This  is  true  whether 
the  object  be  perceived  or  imagined.  If  I  perceive  or  imagine  my 
desk ;  in  either  case,  there  are  an  indefinite  number  of  possible  nuances 
or  adumbrations,  in  which  I,  or  some  other  person,  might  see  it.  The 
actual  percepts  or  images  are  nuances  of  the  real  object  ("real"  in 
the  phenomenological  sense)  ;  but  the  object  does  not  differ  entirely 
from  its  nuances.  In  every  fulfillment  of  intention  or  meaning  there 
is  a  becoming  intuited  (V  eranschaulichung)  (L.  U.,  Vol.  II,  Chap. 
2,  p.  65).  "Every  perception  and  imagination  is  a  web  of  partial 
intentions  fused  into  a  unity  of  total  intention.  The  correlate  of  the 
latter  is  the  thing"  (L.  U.,  Vol.  II,  Chap.  2,  p.  41).  (In  this  respect 
Husserl's  doctrine  is  very  like  that  of  the  present  writer.)  This 
principle  holds  true,  whatever  be  the  character  of  the  thing  which 
is  apprehended  in  or  through  its  nuances  (Abschattungen) .  We  must 
beware  of  supposing  that  the  nuances  "appear";  they  do  not  appear, 
as  though  they  were  phenomena  of  something  entirely  different  behind 
them.  "The  thing-appearance  is  not  the  appearing  thing.  .  .  .  The 
appearances  do  not  appear;  they  are  experienced"   (L.  U.,  Vol.  II, 


WHAT  IS  METAPHYSICS?  17 

Chap.  1,  p.  350) ;  in  them,  thus  far,  the  thing  is  experienced.  This 
is  an  expressly,  almost  naively,  realistic  doctrine. 

In  the  phenomenological  analysis  of  experience  the  fundamental 
distinction  is  that  of  the  act  {AM),  matter  or  meaning-content 
(Bedeutungsgehalt)  and  "object"  (Gegenstand).8  The  act  is  always 
inte?itional ;  alike  in  cognition,  valuation  and  practical  activity.  The 
act  varies  in  quality;  one  can  think,,  represent,  imagine,  assert,  etc., 
the  same  thing.  The  act  means  or  intends  the  "object,"  whether 
theoretical  or  practical;  and  it  means  the  "object"  through  the  con- 
tent. "Object"  is  the  name  for  the  essential  connections  (Wesenszu- 
sammenhdnge)  of  consciousness  (Ideen,  p.  302).  In  perception,  for 
example,  the  percept  is  not  the  act;  it  is  meaning-determining  but 
not  meaning-containing  (L.  U.,  Vol.  II,  Chap.  2,  p.  15).  The  act 
of  knowledge  is  grounded  on  the  act  of  perception.  Significance  lies 
in  meaning.  There  is  a  distinction  between  imminent  and  transcend- 
ent acts.  In  immanent  acts  (that  is,  in  self-observation  or  intro- 
spective analysis  of  one's  own  states)  the  intentional  objects  belong 
to  the  same  stream  of  experience  as  the  act.  In  transcendent  acts,  as 
when  I  interpret  the  inner  life  of  another  self  or  a  physical  event,  the 
act  is  transcendent  since  the  object  transcends  my  experience-stream. 

In  short,  consciousness  is  always  of  something.  In  the  "of"  is 
contained  (1)  the  act  of  being  conscious;  (2)  the  "object"  of  which 
consciousness  is;  and  (3)  the  significant  content  through  which  one 
is  conscious  of  the  object. 

In  the  case  of  experience  of  things  other  than  the  experient's  own 
inner  states,  the  distinction  between  the  three  moments  of  intentional, 
that  is,  meaning-directed,  consciousness  is  clear  and  obvious.  In  the 
case  of  inner  experiences  it  is  not  always  clear,  since  the  content  and 
the  "object"  here  coincide  more  closely;  although  not  completely, 
since  the  very  intuitive  "look  within"  or  introspection  discovers  a 
distinction.  Moreover,  we  can  mean  the  same  inner  experience  or 
attitude,  the  same  image  valuation  volition  or  affection,  by  different 
contents.  I  may,  at  different  times,  purpose  or  affirm  the  same  values 
in  different  psychical  settings,  with  varying  nuances.  Husserl  holds 
that  even  the  same  sensation-content  can  be  apprehended  differently 
(L.  U.,  Vol.  II,  Chap.  2,  p.  381).  An  act  does  not,  he  explicitly 
says,  imply  an  activity  of  the  ego.  The  term  is  not  to  be  taken  in  the 
Aristotelian  or  scholastic  sense  of  actus.  From  act  the  thought  of 
activation  is  absolutely  excluded  (L.  JJ .,  Vol.  II,  Chap.  21,  p.  379). 
But  he  speaks  very  often  as  though  the  act  were  the  expression  of 
psychical  activity.     I  think  the  term  "act"  is  an  unfortunate  one. 

8  Wherever  object  ia  in  quotation  marks  herein   it  is  the  translation  of 
Gegenstand. 


18  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

"Attitude"  seems  to  me  a  much  less  misleading  term.  I  would  assent 
to  the  doctrine  that  every  cognitive  process,  including  fancy  and 
imagination,  as  well  as  every  affection  valuation  or  volition,  whether 
having  external  reference  or  not,  is  an  attitude  of  the  ego.  In  some 
of  its  attitudes  the  ego  is  passive. 

Husserl  holds  that  there  are  intentional  "feelings"  or  "affects," 
but  also  that  there  are  nonintentional  feelings.  The  latter  he  prefers 
to  call  affective  sensations  (Gefuhlsempfijidungen)  in  contrast  with 
affective  acts  (GefiihlsaJcte)  (L.  JJ .,  Vol.  II,  Chap.  1,  pp.  389  ff.). 
That  not  all  experiences  are  intentional  is  shown  by  an  examination  of 
sensations  and  sensation-complexes.  For  example,  the  parts  of  my 
present  visual  field,  though  components  of  my  experience,  are  not 
intended  by  me  as  such.  They  are  not  present  as  such  in  my  con- 
sciousness. He  doubts  whether  even  every  psychical  phenomenon  is 
an  "object"  of  inner  consciousness.  In  all  cases  the  truly  immanent 
contents  that  belong  to  real  constituents  of  the  intentional  experience 
are  not  "intentional."  They  are  the  constitutive  factors  of  the  act, 
but  not  the  "object"  presented  in  the  act;  for  example,  I  do  not  see 
color  sensation  but  colored  things.  When  I  make  appreciations  of  my 
own  feelings  or  attitudes,  I  do  not  feel  feelings  of  worth  or  unworth ; 
I  estimate  definite  concrete  states  of  consciousness.  Husserl  insists 
that,  if  self-observation  be  impossible,  psychology  is  impossible. 
Psychology  deals  with  data  of  inner  experience  in  their  concrete 
varied  empirical  forms;  whereas  phenomenology  deals  with  their 
essential  and  universal  connections,  with  the  "forms"  or  laws  of 
inward-directed  experience  as  well  as  of  outward-directed  experience. 
Phenomenology  encompasses  the  whole  natural  world  and  all  the  ideal 
worlds  (of  mathematics,  logic,  value-  and  culture-sciences)  as  "world- 
meaning"  through  their  essential  characters  of  order  (Ideen,  pp.  302, 
303). 

Husserl,  in  the  Ideen,  Section  II,  treats,  at  some  length,  the  gen- 
eral problem  of  the  relation  of  Reason  and  Reality.  This  subject  also 
receives  some  treatment  in  the  L.  U.,  Vol.  II,  Chap.  2.  An  intentional 
"object,"  or  object  as  meant,  is  called  in  the  Ideen  a  noema.  The 
content  of  a  noema  is  its  "sense"  or  meaning  (Sinn).  The  act  of 
reason  is  called  a  noesis.  The  distinction  is  made  between  assertory 
and  apodictic  evidence  and  insight.  The  basis  of  truth  is  taken  to  be 
"originary  givenness"  (originare  GegehenTie.it),  the  assertoric  seeing 
or  insight.  All  necessity  or  apodicity  in  judgments  is  made  to  rest,  in 
the  last  analysis,  on  the  originary  intuition  or  insight.  Mediate  or 
synthetic  judgments  rest  on  immediate  or  reflectively  intuited  judg- 
ments. 

Husserl  has  not  yet  discussed  in  detail  the  logic  of  inference,  nor 


WHAT  IS  METAPHYSICS?  19 

has  he  indicated  whether,  and,  if  so,  how,  he  would  formulate  a  con- 
ception of  reality  as  a  whole  in  the  metaphysical  sense;  but  it  seems 
evident,  from  the  general  drift  of  his  discussion,  as  well  as  from 
specific  remarks,  that  whatever  has  reality  must  be  a  possible  "object" 
(Gegenstand)  of  conscious  meaning.  The  most  natural  metaphysical 
implication  of  his  theory  would  be  an  objective  idealism.  The  world 
of  things  and  events  presupposes  consciousness;  its  being  is  the  ful- 
fillment of  the  meanings  of  consciousness.  Eoyce's  doctrine  that 
reality  is  the  complete  fulfillment  of  the  internal  meanings  of  ideas 
would  fit  into  Husserl's  theory. 

The  whole  procedure  of  phenomenology  is  reflectively  intuitive. 
There  is  no  use  made  of  induction,  except  in  the  sense  of  the  use  of 
examples  to  illustrate  or  body  forth  intuitive  insights;  neither  dia- 
lectic reasoning  nor  the  method  of  deductive  coherence  is  employed. 
The  "principle  of  principles"  is  this — "Every  originary  dator  intuition 
is  a  justificatory  source  of  knowledge,  and  everything  in  the  intuition 
which  offers  itself  as  originary  (so  to  speak  in  its  bodily  reality)  is 
simply  to  be  accepted  as  it  presents  itself,  but  only  within  the  limits 
in  which  it  presents  itself.  This  no  conceivable  theory  can  make  us 
doubt"  {ldeen,  pp.  43,  44).  We  must  see  the  essential  natures  and 
connections  or  forms,  just  as  we  see  that  2  -j- 1  =  1  -{-  2.  "Seeing 
in  general,  as  the  originary  dator  consciousness  of  whatever  kind,  is 
the  final  justificatory  source  (Rechtsquelle)  of  all  rational  assertion" 
(ldeen,  p.  36). 

There  are  three  serious  difficulties  in  the  reading  of  Husserl,  quite 
apart  from  the  difficulty,  to  which  he  himself  frequently  alludes, 
encountered  in  so  thorough  and  profound  an  investigation.  The 
first  is  the  coining  of  new  terminology.  (This  is  not  a  criticism.) 
The  second  is  the  overelaboration  and  repetition,  sometimes  from 
somewhat  different  angles  and  sometimes  without  obvious  reasons,  of 
points  of  doctrine ;  Husserl  runs  at  times  into  a  confusing  verbalism.9 
The  third  is  that  the  various  partial  investigations,  covering  nearly 
1400  printed  pages,  are  nowhere  focused  together;  the  work  shows  a 
lack  of  synthesis  or  organization.  I  suppose  Husserl  would  say  this 
difficulty  is  unavoidable  in  laying  the  first  foundations  of  a  scientific 
philosophy.  On  the  subjects  of  "Expression  and  Meaning,"  "The 
Ideal  Unity  of  Species,"  "The  Doctrine  of  Whole  and  Part,"  and 
other  subjects,  the  Logische  Untersuchungen  contains  very  valuable 
discussions.  I  cannot  quite  see,  however,  that  Husserl  has  founded 
a  new  science  which  is  the  exclusive  forecourt  of  philosophy.    I  think 

"Dr.  A.  U.  Chandler's  criticism  on  this  score  is  fully  deserved.  Cf.  his 
excellent  article — "Professor  Husserl's  Program  of  Philosophic  Eeform," 
Philosophical  Review,  Vol.  xxvi  (1917),  pp.  634-648. 


20  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

he  has  made  some  very  important  contributions  to  a  descriptive 
analytic  psychology  of  knowledge  and,  thus,  to  logic.  The  question 
whether  his  procedure  is  to  be  called  a  descriptive  psychology  of  mental 
forms  or  phenomenology  seems  to  me  purely  terminological.  In  any 
case  it  contributes  important  prolegomena  to  logic.  I  agree  with 
Bosanquet's  criticism  (Implication  and  Linear  Reference,  Chap.  VII) 
that  Husserl's  complete  separation  of  Logic  from  Psychology  leads, 
in  principle,  to  the  same  divorce  of  thought  and  reality  to  which 
psychologism  leads.  It  is  doubtless  worth  while  to  regard  the  knowing 
and  other  "intentional"  processes  in  the  formal-analytic  manner,  by 
abstraction  from,  by  a  "bracketing"  of,  the  concrete  details  and  prob- 
lems of  the  existential  sciences.  But  phenomenology  is  a  peculiarly 
"abstract"  way  of  regarding  consciousness,  and  we  must  not  forget 
its  abstractions;  otherwise  one  will  be  led,  as  Husserl  is,  into  hair- 
splitting subtleties  that  at  times  get  nowhere.  To  paraphrase  Lotze, 
the  knife  is  sometimes  at  least  being  sharpened  to  cut  the  empty  air. 
A  theory  of  knowledge  is,  in  effect  and  all  along  the  line,  a  theory 
of  the  meanings  of  reality  in  the  sense  of  existence.  The  one  all- 
inclusive  problem  of  philosophical  system  is  the  interpretation  of 
existence  in  its  most  universal  and  self-coherent  meanings.  There  can 
be  omitted  from  the  metaphysics  of  knowledge  special  details  of  the 
metaphysics  of  nature  and  the  metaphysics  of  mind;  but,  "without 
general  metaphysics  no  theory  of  knowledge,"  is  to  me  a  first  principle 
in  philosophy.  As  knowledge,  experience  means  more  than  it  is  as 
fact.  It  transcends  itself,  and  that  very  self-transcendence  requires 
that,  in  the  analysis  of  experience,  we  shall  keep  in  mind  both  the 
existential  order,  which  immediately  is  experience  in  its  personal  and 
cosmical  interrelations,  and  the  consistent  completion  of  this  order  by 
way  of  implied  principle.  I  do  not  yet  see  how  the  various  isolated 
parts  of  phenomenological  inquiry  dovetail  into  a  synthetic  interpreta- 
tion of  experience  as  immediate  reality.  Nor  do  I  see  how  phenomen- 
ology can  become  philosophy  without  transcending  itself  in  a  theory 
of  reality.  When  it  does  this  it  seems  to  me  that  many  of  the 
phenomenological  analyses  will  turn  out  to  have  been  a  rather  super- 
fluous process  of  overelaborated  and  abstruse  word-technic.  Philos- 
ophy cannot  enter  upon  the  sure  road  of  science  by  way  of 
phenomenological  abstraction,  any  more  than  by  way  of  dialectical 
legerdemain.  The  one  sure  and  safe  road  for  philosophy  is  to  bring 
into  intimate  association,  and  to  organize  into  the  greatest  possible 
coherence  and  unity,  the  main  insights  of  the  concrete  sciences,  prac- 
tical life  and  human  evaluation.  I  do  not  look,  with  eager  expectancy, 
for  a  better  metaphysics  founded  on  phenomenology.  We  must 
remain  content  with  imperfect  and  approximate  world  views;  to 


WHAT  IS  METAPHYSICS?  21 

which,  to  some  extent,  the  personal  equation  of  the  thinker  and,  to  a 
greater  extent,  the  spiritual  climate  of  a  culture-epoch  contribute. 
At  best  a  philosophy  is  the  total  synthetic  reaction  of  a  reflective 
open-minded  student  to  the  facts  of  common  human  experience  as 
these  appear  in  terms  of  the  "categories,"  the  fundamental  modes  of 
judgment  of  a  whole  culture  system.  The  personal  equation  and  the 
historical  culture  attitude  enter  even  into  mathematics  and  physics. 
Since  the  interests  which  the  philosopher  would  serve  and  the  material 
in  which  he  works  are  much  richer  and  more  confusing  than  those  of 
the  physical  or  mathematical  sciences,  it  is  no  counsel  of  despair,  nay 
rather  an  expression  of  the  human  value  of  his  subject,  that  leads  a 
student  of  philosophy  to  recognize  the  inevitable  incompleteness  and 
one-sidedness  of  even  his  own  philosophy  and  to  acknowledge  that  he 
cannot  think  things  out  in  a  cell  hermetically  proof  against  the  culture 
in  which  his  spirit  lives,  moves  and  has  its  being. 

Perhaps,  however,  I  have  done  injustice  to  the  originality  of  the 
Husserlian  movement.  Perhaps  it  will  issue  in  a  truly  scientific 
philosophy.  It  may  be  my  own  stupidity  which  prevents  me  from 
discerning  in  it  the  primary  foundations  of  scientific  metaphysics. 


BOOK  I 
THE  THEORY  OF  KNOWLEDGE 


CHAPTER  II 

WHAT  IS  THINKING  ? 

One  of  the  classical  problems  of  modern  philosophy  is  the 
question  of  the  place  of  thinking  in  the  real  universe  and,  by 
consequence,  since  knowledge  is  the  product  of  thinking,  the  ques- 
tion of  the  place  of  knowledge  in  reality.  The  name  epistemology , 
meaning  theory  of  knowledge,  is  given  to  inquiries  of  this  sort. 

Since  my  purpose  here  is  systematic,  and  not  historical,  I  shall 
make  only  such  historical  references  as  may  be  incidental  to  the 
discussion  of  the  problem  itself. 

The  problem  is  not  a  simple  one.  On  analysis  it  breaks  up  into 
the  following  problems:  (1)  What  is  thinking,  considered  as  the 
activity  by  which  truth  is  achieved?  (2)  What  are  the  marks  or 
criteria  of  true  thinking,  or  under  what  conditions  is  knowledge 
possible?  (3)  What  is  the  status  of  truth  or  knowledge  in  the 
order  of  reality,  or  the  relation  between  the  knowing  mind  and  the 
objects  to  which  knowledge  refers  ?  I  shall  now  discuss  these  prob- 
lems in  the  order  given. 

The  most  elementary  act  or  process  of  thinking  is  judgment. 
Judgments  are  expressed  or  symbolized  in  propositions.  For 
example,  "this  room  is  cold"  is  a  judgment  expressed  in  the 
system  of  symbols  which  constitute  a  proposition  in  the  words  of 
the  English  language ;  "x  =  y"  is  a  judgment  expressed  in  a 
proposition  consisting  of  algebraic  symbols.  I  shall  use  the  terms 
judgment  and  proposition  as  equivalent ;  since,  logically,  a  proposi- 
tion is  an  expressed  judgment.  The  grammatical  treatment  of 
propositions  as  sentences  does  not  concern  us  here. 

Judgments  are  objective  in  reference.  A  true  judgment  is  one 
that  would  be  true  for  any  percipient  and  thinker  under  the  same 
conditions.  This  is  obviously  the  case  with  judgments  concerning 
the  external  world  or  scientific  principles.  But  it  is  just  as  true 
of  judgments  concerning  the  subjective  states  of  individuals.  If 
it  be  true  that  I  am  now  suffering  from  headache,  it  is  true  for  all 

25 


26  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

thinkers  in  the  sense  that  any  one  in  my  position  would  know  it  to 
be  a  fact.  The  objects  of  judgment  are  particular  facts  and  factual 
relations  or  connections  of  particulars. 

Actually,  as  made  and  held  by  thinkers,  judgments  may  be 
false  as  well  as  true.  The  meaning-content  or  objective  of  a  judg- 
ment is  as  such  neither  true  nor  false.  It  is  simply  what  it  is.1 
The  meaning  of  a  judgment  might  be  called,  as  Meinong  calls  it, 
a  "supposal."  One  can  entertain  meanings  or  ideas  without  taking 
any  attitude  towards  their  truth  or  falsity;  in  fact  one  can  have 
meaningless  images  or  impossible  and  contradictory  notions.  One 
can  have  mere  ideas  or  presentations  (  Vorstellungen)  and  one  can 
make  judgments.  Making  a  judgment  is  always  a  "Yes — No" 
attitude  on  the  part  of  the  individual  making  it.  He  either  affirms 
a  meaning  directly,  or  he  affirms  a  meaning  indirectly  by  denying 
its  contradictory.  To  apprehend  the  meaning  of  an  idea  is  one 
thing;  to  affirm  its  truth  is  another.2  A  judgment,  in  contrast 
with  mere  apprehension,  is  a  belief.  Of  course  it  is  an  inherent 
tendency  of  the  human  mind  to  believe  every  idea  presented  to  it 
(this  tendency  Bain  calls  "Primitive  Credulity")  ;  still  we  do 
entertain  and  apprehend  the  meanings  of  ideas  without  assent  to, 
or  dissent  from  their  claim  to  truth ;  indeed,  it  is  a  sure  mark  of 
the  cultivated  mind  to  be  able  to  entertain  a  large  company  of 
ideas  without  believing  in  them.  This  raises  the  question,  what  is 
the  distinction  and  relation  between  judgment  and  belief? 

There  is  no  fixed  usage  for  the  term  "belief."  Some  writers, 
such  as  Sir  William  Hamilton,  make  a  disjunction  of  belief  and 
knowledge;  beliefs  are  those  propositions  which  are  accepted  as 
true  on  other  grounds  than  empirical  or  rational  evidence;  we 
believe  where  we  do  not  know  and  cannot  prove.  Others  (and  the 
larger  number,  I  think)  make  belief  the  more  inclusive  term ;  in 
this  sense,  all  meanings  accepted  or  embraced  are  beliefs.  Inas- 
much as  the  greater  part  of  our  knowledge,  so-called,  consists  of 
propositions  which  we  believe  on  grounds  that  furnish  only  a 

1 1  may  call  attention  here  to  the  important  contributions  to  the  psychology 
and  logic  of  judgment  and  meaning  made  by  Brentano,  Meinong  and  Husserl  in 
German  and  by  Bradley,  Bosanquet  and  Stout  in  English.  Cf.  also,  the 
symposium,  "The  Meaning  of  Meaning,"  at  the  Oxford  International  Congress 
of  Philosophy  by  Schiller,  Russell  and  others.  Russell 's  view  of  meaning  is 
indicated  in  his  Analysis  of  Mind.  Schiller's  paper  will  be  found  in  Mind  N.  S., 
Vol.  xxx,  No.  118. 

*  Franz  Brentano  made  this  distinction  very  clearly  in  Psychologie  vom 
empirischen  Standpunkte,  Band  I,  Buch  u,  Chap.  7,  pp.  266  ff. 


WHAT  IS  THINKING?  27 

greater  or  less  degree  of  probability  in  tbeir  favor,  and  we  have 
certain  knowledge  of  but  few  things,  I  think  that  I  am  in  harmony 
both  with  the  prevailing  usage  and  with  the  actual  situation  as  to 
human  knowledge  in  using  the  term  ''belief  to  designate  the  sub- 
jective or  individual  attitude  in  affirming  or  accepting  the  truth 
of  a  judgment  or  proposition.     Subjectively,  beliefs  are  judg- 
ments; objectively,  true  beliefs  are  true  judgments,  that  is,  judg- 
ments whose  meanings  or  "objectives"  (in  Meinong's  sense)  agree 
with  the  facts.    A  true  belief  is  the  assent  of  the  mind  to  a  true 
judgment  or  its  dissent  from  a  false  judgment ;  a  false  belief  is  the 
assent  of  the  mind  to  a  false  judgment  or  its  dissent  from  a  true 
judgment.     Thus,  for  logic  and  theory  of  knowledge,  the  distinc- 
tion between  belief  as  a  psychical  attitude  and  the  objective  status 
of  the  content  or  meaning  of  the  belief  is  most  important.     We 
must  distinguish  between  two  questions :   1.  The  question  of  fact — 
what  motives  actually  lead  individuals  to  believe  in  certain  proposi- 
tions, and  to  disbelieve  in  others;  2.  The  question  of  right — what 
are  the  objective  principles  or  criteria  to  which  beliefs  must  con- 
form in  order  to  be  true,  what  really  makes  them  true  ?    The  first 
question  is  that  of  the  psychology  of  belief,  a  very  interesting  and 
important  subject,  into  which  we  need  not  enter  here;  although  it 
is  worth  while  to  indicate,  summarily,  the  chief  grounds  which 
actually  motivate  human  beliefs.     The  second  question  is  the 
fundamental  problem  of  logic  and  epistemology ;  the  problem  of 
the  criteria  of  truth,  which  will  receive  fuller  consideration  in  our 
fourth  and  subsequent  chapters.     The  identification  of  the  second 
problem  with  the  first  is  "psychologism"  or  "subjectivism"  (some- 
times called  "subjective  idealism")  in  theory  of  knowledge.    If  the 
enumeration  of  the  motives  which  actually  do  lead  people  to  believe 
propositions  be  the  only  account  that  can  be  given  of  the  legitimate 
grounds  of  belief,  it  is  clear  that  every  individual  has  an  equally 
good  right  to  believe  whatever  suits  him  and  there  can  be  no  other 
criteria  of  truth  than  mental  habit  and  feeling.    On  the  other  hand, 
since,  unless  we  admit  right  off  the  bat  the  absolute  authority  of 
some  divine  revelation,  we  can  only  interrogate  human  experience 
in  order  to  find  objective  criteria  of  truth,  it  is  difficult  for  the 
logician  or  epistemologist  to  avoid  falling  into  psychologism.     As 
we  shall  see  more  clearly  later  on,  the  strength  and  weakness  of 
pragmatism  lie  in  its  constant  appeal  to  experience  and  its  inability 
to  avoid  subjectivism. 


28  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

David  Hume  is  the  grandfather  of  all  modern  subjectivists. 
He  defined  belief  as  consisting  in  "a  lively  idea  related  to  or  asso- 
ciated with  a  present  impression."  He  says  that  it  is  chiefly  the 
force,  or  vivacity,  or  solidity,  or  firmness,  or  steadiness  of  ideas 
which  determine  belief  in  them.3  He  overlooks  the  fact  that  we 
may  have  firm,  forcible,  vivacious,  steady  ideas  of  entities  which 
we  believe  to  be  fictitious;  and  weak,  vague,  flickering  ideas  of 
entities  which  we  believe  to  be  real. 

If  two  persons  do  not  mean  the  same  thing  by  the  same  prop- 
osition, they  may  have  the  same  belief  while  thinking  that  they 
disagree,  or  they  may  disagree  while  thinking  that  they  agree. 
The  real  objective  or  content  of  a  belief  is  the  meaning  of  the 
proposition.  What  meaning  means  will  engage  our  attention 
frequently.  Suffice  it  to  say  here  that  it  is  a  quality  or 
group  of  qualities  in  relation,  either  existing  or  derived  from 
existents  (Meinong's  "objects"  of  lower  and  higher  order,  re- 
spectively). 

Belief  in  propositions  may  be  based  on  one  or  more  of  the 
following  motives:  (1)  The  influence  of  tradition  and  social 
suggestion.  Man  is  a  highly  suggestible,  and  therefore  credulous, 
animal.  Many  of  our  beliefs  are  based  simply  on  the  authority  of 
institutions  or  persons  or  on  mass  suggestion.  The  family,  the 
church,  our  associates,  prominent  and  influential  persons,  or  the 
opinion  of  the  majority,  determine  us  to  believe  certain  things. 
It  is  the  line  of  least  resistance  so  to  do.  It  is  diificult,  unpleasant, 
sometimes  dangerous,  not  to  do  so.  (2)  The  desire  to  believe,  "the 
will  to  believe,"  because  the  belief  in  question  yields  or  promises 
to  yield  personal  satisfaction ;  it  promotes  some  end,  satisfies  some 
desire,  holds  out  the  inducement  of  personal  profit  or  social  good. 
(Pragmatists  have  made  the  most  of  this  motive  as  the  criterion 
of  truth.)  (3)  The  self-evidence  of  experience  or  inference  there- 
from. I  believe  in  the  reality  of  my  physical  surroundings,  because 
I  see  and  touch  things;  I  believe  in  the  multiplication  table,  be- 
cause I  see  its  truth  with  the  eye  of  the  mind.  (4)  The  coherence 
or  harmony  of  the  belief  in  question  with  already  accepted  beliefs ; 
consistency  or  system  in  believing.  Epistemology,  the  logic  of 
belief,  is  concerned  to  weigh  and  estimate  all  these  motives  as 
logical  grounds  for  believing.     To  enter  upon  this  subject  here 

*Cf.  Treatise  of  Human  Nature,  Part  iii,  Par.  7. 


WHAT  IS  THINKING?  29 

would  be  to  anticipate  the  work  of  many  of  the  following  chapters.4 
I  proceed  with  the  subject  of  the  nature  of  judgment. 

What  then  is  judgment?  Firstly,  a  judgment  is  always  the 
affirmation  or  denial  of  a  relation  between  a  subject  and  a  predi- 
cate, a  "that"  and  a  "what."  In  the  example  "this  room  is  cold" 
the  "that"  or  subject  is  "this  room,"  the  "what"  or  predicate  is 
"cold" ;  the  relation  affirmed  is  that  coldness  is  a  quality  of  this 
room,  that  is,  in  some  way  belongs  to  or  inheres  in  "this  room."  A 
negatively  expressed  judgment,  be  it  noted,  is  always  expressly  the 
denial  that  a  specific  relation  holds  between  subject  and  predicate 
and,  by  implication,  the  affirmation  that  the  opposite  or  contra- 
dictory predicate  inheres  in  the  subject;  for  example  "this  room 
is  not  cold"  asserts,  by  implication,  that  some  other  quality  in  the 
temperature  order  belongs  to  "this  room." 

Thus  far  all  is  plain  sailing.     No  philosopher  would  disagree 
with  the  above  statement.    But,  when  we  ask  what  are  subject  and 
predicate,  what  are  the  relations  between  them  and  how  can  they 
be  related,  we  immediately  become  involved  in  controversy.     One 
school,  the  objective  or  absolute  idealists,  aver  that  the  subject  of 
a  judgment  is  always  reality  in  some  aspect,  form  or  degree,  and 
that  judgment  is  the  affirmation  of  a  meaning,  a  universal  or  "ideal 
content,"  of  reality.     They   aver,   further,   that  this   definition 
implies,  when  thought  out  fully,  that  reality,  the  ultimate  subject 
of  all  judgments,  is  a  single  systematic  whole  or  organized  totality 
best   described   as   "universal  reason"    (Hegel),   "absolute   self" 
(Royce),  or  "absolute  experience"   (Bradley).     Another  school, 
the  logical  atomists  or  neo-realists,5  aver  that  terms,  that  is,  sub- 
jects and  predicates,  and  relations  have  separate  existence  (or,  in 
the  case  of  universals  and  other  relations,  subsistence),  and  may  be 
joined  and  separated  like  counters  or  marbles.    Empiricists  would 
agree  (and  where  they  wouldn't  they  should)  with  the  objective 
idealists  that  the  subject  of  judgment  is  always  some  fragment  or 
aspect  of  reality. 

Reality  is  the  ultimate  subject  of  all  judgment.     In  order  to 
avoid  misunderstanding,  I  shall  mean  by  "reality,"  anything  that 


Reference  may  be  made  to  the  excellent  article  by  Alexander  Mair  in 
Hastings'  Encyclopaedia  of  Beligion  and  Ethics,  Vol.  ii,  pp.  459-464. 

6  Not  all  logical  atomists  seem  to  be  neo-realists  or  vice  versa.  The  logical 
atomists  insist  that  logic  is  the  essence  of  philosophy  and  they  interpret  logic 
formally. 


30  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

really  exists,  whether  in  the  physical  world  or  in  minds ;  and  by  a 
"truth,"  any  judgment  or  set  of  judgments,  that  is,  any  intellectual 
apprehension,  which  symbolizes  or  represents  significantly  a  real 
existence.  In  short,  reality = existence,  and  truth=  thought 
corresponding  with  existence.6  False  propositions  are  those  which 
do  not  correspond  with  existence,  but  have  coherent  meanings 
that  might  so  correspond.  Unmeaning  propositions  are  those  that 
not  only  do  not  correspond,  but  are  positively  incompatible,  with 
the  nature  of  existence  or  reality.  For  example,  it  is  false  that 
human  beings  can  live  without  eating,  it  is  unmeaning  to  say  that 
ropes  can  be  made  of  sand  or  capital  out  of  debts.  Such  proposi- 
tions have  the  grammatical  form  of  propositions  and,  as  such,  may 
be  printed  or  uttered,  but  they  are  not  logically  real  or  valid 
propositions. 

Existence  or  reality  clearly  includes  physical  bodies,  living 
bodies,  and  minds  with  all  their  thoughts,  feelings,  beliefs  and 
impulsions.      Reality    also    may    include    other   things,    such    as 

•Being,  Keality,  Existence  and  Subsistence. 

The  lack  of  agreement  among  philosophers  in  regard  to  the  terms  used  by 
them,  and  the  failure  to  define  their  terms,  are  responsible  for  much  confusion 
and  misunderstanding.    I  shall  use  the  above  terms  as  follows: 

Being  includes  everything  within  the  universe  of  discourse — all  imaginary, 
absurd,  and  impossible  objects  of  discourse,  such  as  round  squares,  ropes  of 
sand,  capital  made  up  of  debts,  dead  live  men,  virtuous  rocks,  vicious  mathe- 
matical formulae,  as  well  as  all  real  objects.  Since  Parmenides  there  has  been 
much  puzzlement  as  to  how  non-being  can  be  thought.  Plato  asked,  ' '  How  can 
one  think  that  which  is  not?"  and  said  that  non-being  must  have  being  if  it 
can  be  known.  (See  especially  the  Theaetetus  and  the  Sophist).  Hegel  said 
that  non-being  and  being  are  one  and  the  same.  This  means,  I  take  it,  that 
neither  non-being,  nor  being  in  general  or  in  the  abstract,  mean  anything  at  all. 
Non-being,  or  that  which  is  not,  unless  specified,  is  utterly  meaningless;  and 
being,  or  that  which  is,  must  be  always  something  definite.  All  real  being  is 
determinate  or  specific.  Impossible  and  imaginary  objects  of  thought  have 
mental  and  psychical  being  (in  minds  which  think  them  and  on  printed  pages) 
but  not  real  existence.  In  other  words  we  can  form  images  and  ideas  of  non- 
existent and  impossible  objects;  for  example:  an  image  of  a  man  made  of 
green  cheese  or  a  round  square. 

Existence  includes  whatever  really  is.  I  shall  use  existence  and  reality  as 
Bynonymous,  and  as  including  all  sorts  of  determinated  real  beings. 

Subsistence.  Truths,  that  is,  true  judgments  and  propositions,  subsist,  or 
are  valid.  They  do  not  exist,  for  they  are  the  relations  which  obtain  between 
existent  minds  knowing  and  objects  known,  when  minds  correctly  apprehend 
the  nature  of  other  existents,  including  their  own  existence  as  objects  of  thought 
and  their  relations  to  one  another.  (It  will  be  noted  that  I  hold  that  the  nature 
of  any  determinate  existent  or  individual  is  affected  by  and  affects  its  relations 
to  other  existents.  This  doctrine  will  be  argued  later.)  By  saying  that  truth 
or  truths  subsist  I  imply  a  relational  conception  of  truth.  There  would  be  no 
truths  if  there  were  no  minds  to  know. 

See  Leighton,  "The  Objects  of  Knowledge,"  in  The  Philosophical  Review, 
Vol.  xvi   (1907),  pp.  577-587. 


WHAT   IS  THINKING?  31 

electrons  and  disembodied  spirits,  and  all  particular  existents  may 
be  embraced  in  one  all-inclusive  existence  or  absolute  reality.  We 
are  not  now  concerned  with  the  question,  what  existence  or  reality 
includes.  Every  judgment,  that  is  seriously  meant,  has  for  its 
subject  some  fragment  or  aspect  of  reality;  and  every  judgment 
affirms  (or  denies,  and  thus  implicitly  affirms)  that  the  fragment 
or  aspect  of  reality  which  is  its  subject  is  qualified  by,  or  in  some 
way  connected  with,  some  other  fragment  or  aspect  of  reality. 
Thus  the  thinker,  in  making  a  judgment,  affirms  that  he  has  appre- 
hended the  meaning  of  a  relation  between  existential  data  or  facts. 
To  apprehend  and  comprehend  facts  m  relation  is  the  whole  busi- 
ness of  thinking  as  such  (the  psychical  motives  which  impel  to 
thinking  is  another  question)  ;  and  the  relation,  if  correctly  appre- 
hended, is  a  constituent  of  the  whole  fact  as  apprehended  and  com- 
prehended. No  one  seriously  and  persistently  thinks  about  rocks, 
or  birds,  or  triangles,  or  the  principles  of  logic,  unless  he  holds  that, 
in  so  doing,  the  subjects  of  his  thinking  and  the  relations  of  these 
subjects  really  obtain  in,  or  validly  signify  some  aspect  of,  the 
realm  of  existence  or  real  being. 

Every  subject  of  judgment  is  believed  to  exist,  either  as  a  bit 
of  sense  experience,  of  internal  experience  (feeling  and  reflection), 
or  to  be  a  valid  inference  or  construction  from  experience.  The 
implicit  or  explicit  subject  of  judgment  is  always  experience, 
actual  and  possible,  either  in  its  particular  and  specific  qualities 
or  in  its  universal  relations,  meanings  and  values. 

The  work  of  thought,  starting  from  some  item  of  experience, 
is  to  reconstruct  it  by  setting  it  in  a  larger  context,  to  find  its  mean- 
ings; that  is,  to  see  it  in  relation  to  other  items  of  experience. 
Relations  or  universals,  as  thought  of,  are  the  carriers  of  all  the 
meanings  and  values  of  experience  for  the  experiencing  self ;  and, 
as  existing,  are  the  interconnections  of  items  of  experience,  by 
which  their  meanings  and  values  are  sustained  and  enhanced. 

Thinking  functions  in  the  organization  and  reorganization  of 
experience,  which  is  at  once  a  process  of  interpretation  and  of 
reconstruction,  through  interpretation. 

The  operation  of  thinking  has  two  aspects  or  phases:  (1) 
analysis  or  taking  apart  and  (2)  synthesis  or  putting  together. 
The  first  step  in  thinking  is  judgment.  Merely  to  have  an  experi- 
ence, such  as  to  see  a  light  or  color  or  feel  warm  is  not  thinking. 
It  is  mere  ideation.    But  if  one  say,  "Behold,  the  sunlight,"  "That 


32  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

is  red,"  or  "I  feel  warm,"  these  are  judgments,  and  thinking  ha9 
then  begun.  "Horse"  is  a  concept,  not  a  judgment,  but  "there  are 
horses"  is  a  judgment.  It  has  been  proposed  to  distinguish  be- 
tween simple  apprehension  and  judgment,  the  former  being  mere 
awareness  of  an  experience.  The  terms  are,  perhaps,  ill  chosen, 
since  to  apprehend  mentally  is  to  think.  The  distinction  is  between 
simply  experiencing,  or  being  sentient  (which  I  take  to  include 
having  images  or  ideas  floating  in  the  mind  when  in  a  state  of 
reverie  or  day  dreaming),  as  well  to  have  sensuous  feelings,  and 
thinking  the  experience.  As  soon  as  one  thinks  one  employs  unir 
versals.  There  can  be  no  thinking  without  universals.  In  such 
cases  as  "The  pencil  is  here,"  "here"  is  a  universal,  a  meaning. 
Analysis  is  the  process  of  discrimination  by  which  universals  are 
recognized;  and  synthesis,  the  process  by  which  universals  are 
seen  to  be  the  connecting  principles  of  things.  (By  "thing,"  in 
the  present  connection,  I  always  mean  a  determinate  item  of 
experience.)  A  simple  qualitative  likeness,  such  as  color  or 
breadth,  is  a  universal,  and  a  likeness  cannot  be  recognized  with- 
out recognition  of  unlikeness.  Recognition  of  qualitative  likeness 
and  unlikeness  or  difference;  of  numerical  identity  and  diversity; 
of  more  and  less  of  the  same  kind  in  number,  magnitude  and 
intensity;  of  identity  and  diversity  in  meanings  and  universals;  of 
a  regular  order  or  causal  sequence  in  change — such  are  some  of  the 
elementary  ways  in  which  thinking,  as  at  once  analytic  and  syn- 
thetic, operates  in  the  ordering  of  experience.  To  think  is  to  relate 
or  order,  to  relate  is  to  synthesize,  but  to  relate  is  equally  to  have 
discriminated  or  analyzed.  For  items  of  experience,  whether 
percepts,  images  or  concepts,  as  subjects  of  thought,  have  signifi- 
cant differences  only  in  so  far  as  they  have  also  significant  like- 
nesses, and  vice  versa.  We  neither  compare  nor  separate  V2  and 
the  flavor  of  champagne  because,  there  being  nothing  common  to 
them,  there  is  nothing  significantly  different  between  them. 

An  inference  is  a  combination  of  judgments.  It  is  the  attribu- 
tion of  a  universal  to  a  subject,  through  the  mediation  of  another 
universal.  We  are  not  here  concerned  with  the  logical  problem  of 
inference,  which  is  the  problem  as  to  how  from  one  universal  we 
have  a  right  to  pass  to  another ;  beyond  saying  that  there  must  be 
some  identical  quality  in  the  universals,  if  the  inference  is  to  be 
valid ;  the  two  universals  must  be  grounded  in  a  wider  universal. 
For  example:   "Roses  are  plants;  plants  are  perishable;  therefore, 


WHAT  IS  THINKING?  33 

roses  are  perishable" ;  means  that  perishableness  is  common  at 
least  to  roses  and  other  plants,  and  possibly  to  other  things. 

The  function  of  thought  then  is  the  interpretation  of  experience 
in  terms  of  universals ;  and,  through  this  interpretation,  the  organ- 
ization or  ordering  of  the  data  of  experience  into  a-  more  systematic 
whole  of  meaning,  in  order  to  arrive  at  a  self-coherent  view  of 
things,  a  harmonious  system  of  meanings,  which  can  be  used  and 
enjoyed  by  selves — one  that  will  work  in  practice  and  be  emotion- 
ally satisfying  since  it  grows  out  of  experience,  and,  being  logically 
consistent  with  it,  reveals  and  enhances  the  significance  of  the 
empirical  order.  And  experience  is  to  be  understood  here  in  the 
most  liberal  sense — to  include  the  facts  of  sense  perception,  of 
moral  experience,  of  interpersonal  affection,  aesthetic  intuition  and 
religious  feeling.  The  interpretative  and  organizing  function  of 
thought  is  relevant  to  the  understanding  and  coordination  of  all 
these  types  of  experience  into  more  inclusive  orders. 

The  chief  forms  or  categorical  ways  in  which  thought  functions 
in  organizing  experience  are :  qualitative  likeness  and  unliJceness, 
or  sameness  and  difference;  numerical  identity  and  diversity, 
unity  and  plurality;  7  intensive  and  extensive  magnitude  (greater, 
less  and  equal  in  degrees  of  the  same  quality) ;  temporal  sequence 
(before,  after  and  simultaneous  with)  ;  causal  order,  purposive 
order,  individuality  and  totality.  We  shall  not  discuss  here  the 
metaphysical  significance  of  these  categories,8  but  it  is  in  place  to 
point  out  briefly  how  they  operate  in  the  organization  of  experi- 
ence. 

Likeness  and  unliJceness  are  first  discerned  and  employed  on 
the  merely  qualitative  level,  that  is,  before  the  mind  has  learned  to 
formulate  and  employ,  in  the  field  of  perception,  quantitative  units 
and  measurements.  The  primary  elements  of  knowledge  are 
things,  that  is,  complexes  of  sensory  qualities.  Like  things  are 
complexes  of  qualities  in  which  the  significant  or  important  like- 
nesses in  qualities  seem  to  overbalance  the  differences.  Of  course 
whether  things  are  classified  as  like  or  unlike,  the  same  or  different 

1  The  two  latter  pairs  are  built  up  by  a  clearer  thought-development  out  of 
the  primitive  and  vague  recognition  of  likeness  and  unlikeness;  a  thing  is 
identical  with,  because  wholly  like,  itself;  things  are  different  because  the 
unlikenesses  exceed  the  likenesses  or  at  least  prevent  the  recognition  of  same- 
ness; a  unit  is  a  thing  that  is  wholly  self  -identical ;  a  plurality  is  a  collection 
or  series  of  units. 

8  See  Book  ii. 


34  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

in  kind,  is  a  matter  of  degree  and  relative  to  the  interests  and 
purposes  of  the  classifiers.     If  a  herdsman  is  counting  up  all  his 
live  stock,  pigs,  goats,  sheep,  cattle  and  horses  are  alike  in  that  they 
are  all  live  stock ;  if  he  is  trading  goats  for  horses,  goats  and  horses 
are  different.     The  recognition  of  degrees  of  intensity  and  magni- 
tude, in  the  same  quality  or  in  similar  things,  is  the  next  step,  and 
it  marks  the  beginning  of  measurement  through  number,  spatial 
extent  and  weight;  one  horse  is  swifter  than  another,  one  pig  is 
bigger  and  contains  more  pork  than  another.     Thus  there  arises 
the  notion  of  a  unit  of  quality,  which  is  contained  in  a  given  thing 
or  collection  of  things  a  specific  number  of  times;  for  example, 
coldnesses   and  warmths,   brightnesses,   lengths,   breadths,   thick- 
nesses, weights,  rates  of  movement.    Measurement  is,  in  all  cases, 
dependent  upon  the  recognition  of  a  unit  of  quality;  even  in  the 
measurement   of  merely  extensive  magnitude,   for   instance  the 
dimensions  of  a  lumber  pile,  it  is  the  containing  of  a  qualitative 
unit,  that  is  a  unit  of  spatial  extent  that  is  in  question.     The  con- 
cept of  number  is  the  simplest  and  clearest  illustration  of  the  way 
in  which  the  mind  builds  up,  from  its  vague  primitive  notions  of 
individuality,  likeness  and  unlikeness,  relation  and  order,  a  sys- 
tematic scheme  of  thought.     The  original  of  the  notion  of  arith- 
metical unity  is  undoubtedly  the  empirical  intuition  of  individuals 
or  particulars  with  determinate  characters.    Counting  begins  with 
things  that,  for  practical  purposes,  are  units;  the  individual  man 
and   his   digits;    other   human    individuals,    animals,    and   other 
natural  objects.     These  are  classified  by  important  resemblances 
into  classes  and  groups,  and  then  indexed  or  systematized.    A  class 
is  a  repetition  of  like  units.    A  group  is  a  system  or  order  of  units, 
regarded  as  interrelated  and  thus  constituting  a  whole.     It  is  a 
one-in-many  or  many-in-one.     The  fact  that  we  can  only  count 
individuals,  classify  them,  and  arrange  them  into  groups,  by  a 
process  involving  a  temporal  sequence  gives  rise  to  the  notion  of 
order. 

A  collection  or  a  group  of  simultaneously  existing  things, 
whether  concrete  things  or  the  properties  of  space,  is  a  reversible 
order,  whereas  a  causal  sequence  is  an  irreversible  order.  And 
the  principle  of  continuity  is  primarily  that  of  temporal  persistency 
of  likeness  and  identity  through  difference  and  diversity;  that  is, 
of  continuity  of  existence  through  succeeding  moments  of  time  and 
in  differing  portions  of  space.    The  recognition  of  spatial  continu- 


WHAT   IS  THINKING?  35 

ity  is  dependent  on  the  recognition  of  temporal  continuity.  At 
first  there  is  no  distinction  made  in  human  thinking  between 
mechanical  and  purposive  order.  When  once  this  distinction 
arises,  mechanical  order  becomes  the  clear  case  of  reversible  series 
and  purposive  order  that  of  irreversible  series  of  events.9 

The  mind  abstracts  from  the  empirical  qualitative  notions  of 
individuality,  classes,  and  groups  the  notions  of  unity,  repetition, 
class  relation,  group  relation,  order,  whole  part-order,  as  formal 
concepts  applicable  to  all  sorts  of  natural  entities  or  contents. 
Thus  numerical  relations  become  the  parent  types  of  abstract,  that 
is,  contentless  categories  of  unity,  plurality,  class  relation,  order, 
whole  and  part.  Thus  the  analytic-synthetic  activity  of  thought 
gives  rise  to  the  notions  of  pure  discreteness,  natural  numbers,  and 
unification  of  the  discrete  assemblages  or  groups  of  numbers. 

Thus,  in  the  manner  sketched  above,  there  arise,  through  the 
activity  of  thought,  the  primary  universale,  or  categories  of  think- 
ing, by  which  all  experience  is  organized.  The  same  motives  and 
methods  of  thought  are  at  work  in  the  herdsman  counting  and 
manipulating  his  live  stock  as  in  the  philosopher  trying  to  conceive 
and  arrange  in  a  systematic  or  orderly  scheme  the  whole  of  em- 
pirical existence.  The  chief  differences  are  the  more  universal 
sweep  of  the  philosopher's  interest  and  outlook  and  the  deeper 
penetration  of  his  analysis. 

The  primary  universals,  such  as  the  fundamental  categories 
and  the  principles  of  logic,  are  timelessly  valid  meanings  which  get 
temporal  application  in  concrete  intuitional  shape  in  actual  human 
knowledge;  but  which  cannot  be  themselves  products  of  mere 
human  thinking.  These  timelessly  valid  meanings  must  be  the 
structural  constituents  of  the  universe  in  so  far  as  it  is  rational, 
elements  in  the  systematic  intelligibility  or  universal  reason  which 
is  implied  in  the  coherence  of  the  world  order.  There  are  two 
kinds  of  universals,  the  primary  universals  or  fundamental  cate- 
gories which  are  the  most  fundamental  predicates  of  empirical 
reality.  Examples  of  these  are  likeness,  unlikeness,  identity, 
diversity,  systematic  unity  (identity  in  difference  or  individuality 
of  which  selfhood  and  thinghood  are  special  forms)  ;  continuity  in 
change  (of  which  substance  and  uniformity  are  special  forms) ; 
causality  (which  involves  continuity  and  novelty)  ;  end  and  sys- 

9  For  full  discussion  of  the  categorical  types  above  enumerated  sea  Book  ii, 
Chaps.  10-17. 


36  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

tematic  totality  or  wholeness  and  order  (the  full  meaning  of 
unity).  Secondary  universals  are  general  empirical  predicates, 
intuited  by  us  in  interpreting  the  structure  of  special  classes  of 
reality  or  particular  fact.  They  always  involve  an  empirical  ele- 
ment of  sense  perception  or  feeling,  and  are  thus  conditioned  in 
their  scope  and  meaning  by  particular  fact.  Examples  of  these  are 
whiteness,  loudness,  bitterness,  painfulness,  happiness,  love.  In 
short,  the  secondary  universals  involve  both  particular  experiences 
and  the  reaction  of  the  thinker  thereto.  They  arise  from  the  inter- 
preting activity  of  thought,  and  thus  presuppose  the  unconscious 
operation  of  the  primary  categories.  The  question  as  to  whether 
we  immediately  apprehend  these  universals  seems  to  me  a  purely 
psychological  one  and  unimportant  for  logic  and  metaphysics.  My 
own  view  is  that  we  do  immediately  apprehend  them. 

Empirical  universals  occupy  a  middle  ground  between  sensory 
particulars  and  the  primary  categories.  Thus  we  find  an  ascending 
scale  of  universality  or  comprehensiveness  in  knowledge  from  par- 
ticular fact  up  the  most  universal  and  nonempirical  principles 
employed  in  the  organization  of  experience.  Sensory  particulars 
are  truths  of  fact,  and  nonempirical  universals  are  truths  of  reason. 
This  distinction,  however,  cannot  be  ultimate.  It  represents  our 
inability  to  organize  completely  the  particulars  of  experience  into 
an  articulated  whole  or  reflective  intuition  of  meaning.  Truth  of 
bare  fact  and  truth  of  reason  represent  respectively  the  beginnings 
and  the  ideal  completion  of  the  intuition  of  reality  as  a  perfected 
system  of  meanings — the  two  ends  of  our  knowing  separated  and 
connected  by  a  middle  region  in  which  our  thought  works  in  its 
endeavor  progressively  to  grasp  reality  as  a  living  totality. 

The  primary  universals,  which  constitute  the  meanings  and 
grounds  of  all  cognized  relations  between  particulars,  and  which, 
hence,  are  the  conditions  of  the  grouping  of  objects  into  classes,  of 
their  organization  into  systematic  totalities,  of  the  correlation  of 
events  into  causal  orders  or  series,  are  not  necessarily  expressions 
of  existential  or  ontological  identity  of  the  things  related.  If  one 
say  "the  same  causes  are  at  work  here  and  now  as  there  and  then," 
that  does  not  mean  numerical  identity,  but  only  similarity  or  like- 
ness. The  world  consists  of  objects  of  knowledge  that  can  be 
arranged  in  a  great  variety  of  classes,  types,  groups  or  orders, 
because  of  the  great  variety  of  qualitative  and  dynamic  similarities 
which  coexist  or  occur  in  successive  moments  of  time.      (Note 


WHAT  IS  THINKING?  37 

Royce's  discussion  in  Ruge's  Encyclopaedia  of  the  Philosophical 
Sciences,  Vol.  I,  "Logic")  For  instance,  a  causal  law  is  a  case 
of  one  kind  of  event  being  the  sine  qua  non  of  another  kind  of 
event. 

The  fundamental  postulate  of  thought  is  that  the  elements  of 
the  world  are  interrelated  parts  of  one  whole  or  system  (universe). 
This  postulate  does  not  imply  that  these  elements  are  really  iden- 
tical in  stuff  or  nature.  It  implies  only  that  the  elements  are,  in 
various  significant  fashions,  relevant  to  each  other ;  that  there  are 
many  kinds  or  types  of  similarities  of  quality,  quantity,  group  or 
serial  order  or  relational  sequence  or  appreciable  value  between 
them.  Reality  may  ultimately  consist  of  many  dynamic  types  of 
being,  existing  and  operating  in  manifold  types  of  relationships 
rather  than  one  being  with  many  differentiations  internal  to  it. 
(If  there  be  only  one  real  being,  there  is  no  sense  in  speaking  of 
it  as  one  in  kind.    Kind  implies  at  least  two  examples.) 

I  have  said  that  thought  aims  to  group  its  objects  in  a  sys- 
tematic or  ordered  totality  of  relationships.  It  sets  before  itself 
the  task  of  conceiving  the  world  of  knowables  in  a  spatial  whole  or 
system  of  reciprocally  related  elements,  and  in  a  temporal  whole 
or  continuity  of  dependent  sequences.  Its  goal  would  be  absolutely 
achieved  if,  at  any  moment,  all  the  not-further-analyzable,  and 
qualitatively  unique,  and  numerically  distinct  elements  of  reality 
were  grouped  as  a  system  of  reciprocally  dependent  factors;  and 
if  the  successive  temporal  phases  of  the  systematic  whole  could  be 
seen  to  imply  one  another  as  a  completed  series  seen  in  a  supra- 
temporal  system  of  relationships,  totus,  teres  atque  rotundus.  This 
ideal  is  what  Spinoza  means  by  his  knowledge  sub  specie  ceter- 
nitatis  (seeing  all  things  under  the  form  of  eternity),  Hegel  by 
"the  absolute  idea,"  Bradley  and  Bosanquet  by  "the  principle  of 
ground"  as  the  logical  nerve  or  principle  of  totality  of  the  real, 
Royce  by  his  "all-knower."  In  such  a  perfect  insight  all  empirical 
plurality  and  all  temporal  sequences  would  be  transformed  into  a 
system  of  nontemporal  relationships.  Bosanquet  says  that  when 
causation  is  thought  out,  the  notion  of  time  vanishes  and  the 
principle  of  causation  becomes  the  principle  of  ground.  Thus,  the 
logical  ideal  of  coherence  or  systematic  totality  is  converted  into  a 
metaphysical  criterion  of  ultimate  reality,  and  the  temporal 
actuality  of  human  experience  is  viewed  as  absorbed  into  a  time- 
less or  eternal  totality  of  being. 


38  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

I  admit  that  all  real  entities  or  individuals,  and  all  relation- 
ships which  they  sustain,  must  now,  or  at  any  other  given  moment 
of  time,  be  internal  to  the  totality  of  the  real.10  To  say  this  is  to 
say  nothing  more  than  that,  in  knowing,  we  are  dealing  with  our 
data  as  parts  of  the  universal  order.  But  this  admission  settles 
nothing  as  to  the  relative  degrees  of  independence  and  self- 
determination  to  be  accorded  to  the  individual  members  of  the 
total  reality.  It  settles  nothing  whatever  as  to  the  specific  char- 
acters and  degrees  of  the  interrelationships  of  any  two  or  more 
entities.  To  grasp  the  ground  of  the  being  of  any  thing,  or  of  the 
occurrence  of  any  event,  is  to  gain  an  insight  into  the  objective 
system  of  relationships  or  determinate  orders  in  which  things  and 
events  live  and  move  and  have  their  being.  The  moving  spring 
of  every  effort  towards  the  unification  of  knowledge  is  the  faith 
that  the  world  is  a  systematic  and  intelligible  totality ;  that  it  is, 
in  some  considerable  degree,  one  orderly  whole,  whose  successive 
phases  are  at  least  partially  continuous. 

But  to  say  this  settles  nothing  as  to  the  precise  degree  and 
manner  in  which  the  being  of  any  real  entity  has  its  ground 
respectively  in  itself  and  outside  itself,  or  as  to  the  degree  in  which 
the  successive  phases  of  the  actual  behavior  and  qualities  of  any- 
thing real  could  be  determined  now  if  one  had  a  complete  insight 
into  the  totality  of  relationships  in  which  real  entities  at  present 
stand  to  one  another  and  as  to  the  degree  in  which  successive  phases 
of  reality  are  discontinuous  or  continuous. 

If  time  and  change  disappear  from  an  interpretation  of 
reality  just  in  the  measure  in  which  that  interpretation  nears  com- 
pletion; if,  for  example,  time  has  no  place  in  complete  causal 
explanation,  then  both  mechanical-causal  explanation  and  teleo- 
logical  interpretation  of  the  world  process  or  any  bit  thereof  vanish 
or  become  meaningless  and  unreal  when  they  reach  their  fruitions. 
In  brief,  if  the  logical  ideal  of  knowledge  is  taken  to  involve  the 
absolute  monistic  and  eternalistic  conception  of  reality  as  a  time- 
less whole  or  system,  of  which  the  finite  temporal  individual  ele- 
ments are  illusory  and  transitory  differentiations,  then  the  realm 
of  experience,  from  which  we  set  out,  in  which  alone  we  live  and 
act  and  have  our  being,  and  the  logical  activity  of  thought  itself 
are  illusory  guides  which  lure  us  to  intellectual  self-annihilation. 

10  On  relations  see  further  Book  ii,  Chap.  12. 


WHAT  IS  THINKING?  39 

Knowledge  means  at  once  the  comprehension  of  the  mutual 
relevancies  or  orderly  interdependences  of  the  many  distinct 
existences,  which  make  up  reality,  and  of  the  uniqueness  of  the 
being  of  each  existence.  It  means,  at  once,  the  interpretation  of 
the  successive  phases  of  the  actual  as  orderly  series  or  continuous 
sequences,  and  the  recognition  of  the  uniqueness  of  each  successive 
phase  in  the  life  of  the  universe  or  of  any  part  thereof. 


APPENDIX 

existence  and  subsistence 

Philosophy  and  Gegenstandstheorie 

In  a  series  of  influential  works,  the  late  Professor  A.  von  Meinong 
developed  what  he  regarded  as  a  hitherto  unworked  field  in  Philos- 
ophy— Gegenstandstheorie,  Theory  of  Objects;  "Object"  being  used 
in  the  sense  of  any  object  of  thought,11  anything  that  can  be  mentally 
apprehended  or  intended,  including  actual  and  ideal  objects,  possible 
and  impossible  things.  Actual  things,  such  as  chairs  and  tables; 
ideal  entities,  such  as  geometrical  and  numerical  truths;  imaginary 
things,  such  as  centaurs  and  hippogriffs ;  impossible  and  contradictory 
entities,  such  as  round  squares,  sand  ropes — are  all  Gegenstande.  All 
possible  Gegenstande  subsist  (bestehen)  ;  one  class  of  them  exists, 
namely,  empirical  things.  Existents  are  temporal,  they  persist  in 
time.  Pure  subsistents,  such  as  mathematical  principles,  are  timeless. 
Causal  relations  are  not  relevant  to  pure  subsistents.  There  is  a 
mixed  class  in  which  the  basis  of  the  subsistent  entity  is  empirical, 
and  therefore  temporal,  existence,  whereas  the  subsistent  principle  of 
itself  is  timeless ;  for  example,  if  we  say  that  a  certain  man  resembles 
another  man  who  has  died,  the  men  are  temporal  existents;  whereas 
the  resemblance  is  a  timeless  truth.  Eesemblance  and  difference  are 
timeless  entities.  To  say  that  the  difference  between  red  and  green 
exists  at  a  certain  time  has  scarcely  more  meaning  than  to  call  a 
musical  tone  white  or  black.  The  meaning  of  a  judgment  (or  of  a 
supposal,  Annahme,  as  in  the  case  of  guesses,  surmises,  fancies)  is 

M The  most  important  of  these  writings  are:  TJeber  Gegenstande  hoherer 
Ordnung,  Zeitschrift  fur  Psychologie,  Vol.  xxi,  1896;  Ueber  Gegenstands- 
theorie, in  TJntersuchungen  zur  Gegenstandstheorie  und  Psychologie,  1914. 
TJeber  Annahmen,  2d  Edition,  1910;  and  Ueber  der  Stellung  der  Gegenstands- 
theorie im  System  der  Wissenschaften,  1907;  also  in  the  Zeitschrift  fur 
Philosophic 


40  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

its  "objective."  "Supposals"  are  not  mere  ideas  or  images,  since  a 
supposal  always  involves  a  tentative  yes  or  no;  as  in  the  case  of  a 
guess,  a  presumption,  a  surmise.  Meinong's  discussions  of  supposals 
are  a  valuable  contribution  to  the  psychology  of  imagination,  and 
meaning,  and  therefore  to  logic.  The  objective  is  the  meaning-con- 
tent (Bedeutungsinhalt)  of  the  act  of  judgment  or  supposal,  whereas 
an  object  {Objekt  not  Gegenstand),  for  Meinong,  is  always  an  actual 
reality.  Thus  the  objective  in  any  act  of  thought  is  gegenstdndliche. 
The  meanings  of  judgments  (and  supposals)  are  their  Sosein,  their 
nature  or  "what."  Thus  many  objectives  have  Sosein,  but  not  Sein; 
they  have  no  corresponding  existents,  no  "thats."  Meinong's  dis- 
tinction between  Sosein  and  Sein  or  existence  seems  to  be  the  same 
as  our  English-speaking  distinction  between  the  "what"  and  the 
"that";  his  objective  is  simply  the  "what"  of  our  philosophical  dis- 
course.12 He  says  that  one  grasps  or  apprehends  a  Gegenstand  in  its 
Sosein  or  "what";  but  what  one  judges  is  either  its  Sein  or  being  or 
its  further  Sosein  in  relation.  Relations  and  complexes  (which  result 
from  reflection  upon  primary  objects  of  thought)  are  Gegenstdnde 
hbherer  Ordnung — "objects"  (in  his  technical  sense)  "of  higher 
order."  If  a  superior  is  necessarily  based  on  an  inferior  it  is 
"founded"  (fundiert)  on  the  latter.  All  objects  of  knowledge  are 
factual  (thatsdchlich)  objectives  or  facts.  The  term  fact  is  to  be 
applied  not  only  to  empirical  existents  but  to  all  valid  propositions; 
for  example,  to  those  of  mathematics.  All  facts  are  known  through 
evidence,  which  may  be  either  rational  (a  priori)  or  empirical  (a 
posteriori).  All  empirical  fact  is  temporally  existent.  All  rational 
fact  is  timelessly  subsistent.  Whatever  can  exist  must  also  subsist; 
it  gains  existence  when  it  becomes  temporal  fact;  for  example,  until 
recently  a  dirigible  airship  had  only  subsistent  being;  now  it  exists. 
Contradictory  and  impossible  "objects"  (Gegenstande.)  have  an  extra- 
existential  subsistence  (Aussersein).  There  are  objects  that  are  not 
(Es  gibt  Gegenstdnde  das  nicht  sind) ;  for  example,  a  round  square 
or  a  p&rpetuum  mobile. 

Metaphysics,  as  Meinong  conceives  its  province,  is  the  most  com- 
prehensive science  of  empirical  existence.  It  deals  with  the  general 
characters  and  interrelationships  of  empirical  and  temporal  reality. 
Gegenstandstheorie  is  an  a  priori  companion  to  metaphysics  and  an 
indispensable  prelude  to  the  theory  of  knowledge.  Meinong  has  made 
here  important  contributions  to  logic  and  theory  of  knowledge.  But 
I  do  not  agree  with  all  the  conclusions  drawn  from  his  analysis  of 
Gegenstande. 


13 Cf.  particularly,     F.  H.  Bradley's  Principles  of  Logic  and  Appearance 
and  Reality,  passim. 


WHAT  IS  THINKING?  41 

The  doctrine  that  subsistent  being  is  a  wider  and  richer  class  of 
entities  than  existence  and  that  the  latter  is  a  sort  of  temporal  and 
empirical  specification  of  the  former  seems  to  provide  a  realm  of  being 
for  universals  or  meanings  independent  of  any  mind;  it  lends  sup- 
port to  the  sort  of  realism  which  would  give  to  "ideal  objects"  (Uni- 
versals and  Values)  a  super-existential  and  nonmental  being.  Mei- 
nong  himself  believes  in  impersonal  values.  At  this  point  Logical 
Eealism  becomes  identical  with  that  sort  of  abstract  or  impersonal- 
istic  idealism  which  confers  on  pure  universals,  such  as  the  propo- 
sitions of  pure  logic  and  mathematics,  the  universal  relationships  or 
"laws"  of  reality,  and  universal  values,  a  super-existential  and  timeless 
being  which  is  imperfectly  and  intermittently  embodied  in  empirical 
and  temporally  conditioned  existents.  Abstract  principles  are  ac- 
corded a  being  superior  to  actual  reality.  This,  of  course,  is  the 
sort  of  logical  realism  or  abstract  idealism  which  is  frequently  at- 
tributed to  Plato.  It  figures  prominently,  in  one  disguise  or  another, 
in  NeoKantianism  (for  example,  in  the  Marburger  School)  and  even 
in  the  value-philosophy  of  the  Baden  school  (Windelband  and  others). 
Indeed,  the  step  is  short  from  the  doctrine  that  universals  and  values 
have  an  eternally  subsistent  being  to  a  consciousness  in  general  or  a 
transcendent  Ought  as  the  ultimate  reality. 

The  doctrine  that  subsistence  is  some  sort  of  transcendental  non- 
mental  and  nonphysical  being  is  based  on  a  misuse  of  language.  It 
seems  to  me  to  rest  on  the  same  fallacy  as  the  Ontological  Argument. 
Existence  is  not  a  predicate  to  be  added  to  the  "what"  of  any  real  sub- 
ject. Subsistence  is  not  a  kind  of  superior  and  timeless  being.13 
There  can  be  no  timeless  being,  except  in  the  sense  of  endless  per- 
sistence or  endless  duration.  Even  a  real  God  could  be  timeless  only 
in  the  latter  sense.  Contradictory  or  impossible  objects  of  thought, 
and  even  imaginary  objects  of  thought,  really  exist  only  as  images  or 
symbols  in  the  mind  of  some  individual  and  in  the  linguistic  or  sym- 
bolic expressions  of  that  mind.  A  round  square  or  a  rope  of  sand 
are  simply  unmeaning  conjunctions  of  linguistic  symbols — unmean- 
ing because  they  are  combinations  of  contradictory  concepts.  A  cen- 
taur is  a  conjunction  of  images,  which  conjunction  is  not  factually 
impossible  but  is  empirically  unverifiable.     A  perpetuum  mobile  is  a 

uIn  patristic  theology  and  mediaeval  philosophy  subsistence  does  not  mean 
super-  or  extra-existential  being.  It  means  real,  persistent  essential  being  or 
existence,  in  contrast  with  nonexistence  and  contingent  existence.  In  the  older 
English  writers  it  is  used  in  the  same  general  sense;  Baxter,  for  instance,  says 
that  the  three  great  attributes  of  God — omnipotence,  understanding  and  will — 
those  attributes  by  which  he  is  God,  are  by  some  called  subsistential.  "Sub- 
sistential  Being ' '  is  the  equivalent  of  ' '  Essential  Being. ' '  The  same  general 
usage  will  be  found  in  Sir  Thos.  Browne,  Milton  and  Cudworth. 


42  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

vague  expression  for  something  incompatible  with  the  empirical  con- 
ditions of  movement.  It  cannot  even  be  meant  or  thought  through. 
Such  things  have  not  even  pure  logical  subsistence.  If  they  had  they 
might  be  brought  into  existence.  In  the  last  analysis  all  meanings, 
universals,  laws,  and  values  are  derived  by  mental  activity,  through 
the  process  of  abstractive  construction,  from  empirical  existence.  Ex- 
istence is  prior  and  superior  to  subsistence.  Nothing  is  logically  possi- 
ble, nothing  has  meaning,  that  is  incompatible  with  actual  existence. 
Even  the  principles  of  logic  and  mathematics  are  but  symbolic  ex- 
pressions for  the  most  general  ways  in  which  minds  behave.  If  all 
minds  were  blotted  out  of  existence  there  would  be  no  logic  or  mathe- 
matics to  subsist.  The  same  is  true  even  more  obviously  of  physical 
science.  The  laws  of  physics  do  not  subsist  above  nature  and  they 
do  not,  as  such,  exist  in  nature.  Nature  has  a  certain  texture,  certain 
observable  characteristics  (qualities  or  ways  of  behaving).  Our  sci- 
entific laws  are  symbols  invented  by  minds  for  the  description  of 
these  general  ways  of  behaving.  Science,  indeed  all  truth,  subsists 
only  in  and  for  thinking  minds.  Its  validity  depends,  in  the  last 
resort,  on  the  degree  of  vital  correspondence  that  is  possible  between 
minds  and  the  "nature"  of  nature  as  revealed  through  sense  ex- 
perience. 

Above  all  things,  to  talk  of  values  or  appreciations  as  having  any 
sort  of  being  without  valuators  or  appreciators  seems  to  me  sheer 
nonsense.  If  values  are  not  mere  figments  engendered  by  human 
desire  and  imagination  there  must  be  a  vital  correspondence  between 
the  fundamental  interests  of  human  beings  and  physical  nature.  In 
short,  laws,  meanings,  values,  have  no  being  apart  from  the  feelings 
and  activities  of  selves  or  persons  in  dynamic  interplay  with  Nature. 
In  so  far  as  they  may  be  valid  or  effective,  laws  and  values  are  the 
mental  counterparts  of  the  ways  in  which  nature  behaves  in  response 
to  the  demands  of  human  personality. 

I  have  felt  it  necessary  at  this  point  to  anticipate,  in  sketchy 
form,  a  main  theme  of  this  work,  since  it  is  raised  in  all  its  aspects 
by  the  much-touted  distinction  between  subsistence  and  existence, 
with  which  many  so-called  realists,  as  well  as  idealists  who  find 
refuge  in  a  vicious  abstractionism,  try  to  save  science  and  human 
values  while  letting  the  troublesome  and  perplexing  problem  of  per- 
sonality go  hang.  This  is  throwing  out  the  baby  with  the  bath. 
Let  us  not  be  imposed  upon  by  that  vice  to  which  philosophers  and 
scientists  are  peculiarly  tempted  although  no  one  is  immune  from  it — 
the  vice  of  setting  up  abstractions  and  symbols  in  the  place  of  con- 
crete realities.  The  only  business  of  systematic  philosophy  or  meta- 
physics is  to  try  to  understand  as  fully  as  possible  the  world  as  it  is. 


WHAT  IS  THINKING?  43 

The  world  is  no  "appearance"  or  illusion ;  we  are  appearances  of  and 
in  it,  although  I  hope  not  illusions;  our  concepts,  laws,  universals, 
even  our  so-called  universal  values,  are  but  appearances  engendered 
by  our  minds  in  interaction  with  the  rest  of  the  cosmos.  One  ordi- 
nary human  self  is  worth  more,  as  a  reality,  than  all  the  ineffable 
values  ever  conceived  by  the  minds  of  philosophers.  In  this  respect 
a  healthy  common  sense  is  right.  The  naive  realist  is  right  when  he 
stubbornly  believes,  in  spite  of  sophisticated  argumentation,  that  what 
he  perceives  and  feels  are  good  realities.  Any  other  starting  point 
plays  into  the  hands  of  that  sickly  illusionism  which,  in  Hindu  specu- 
lation par  excellence,  has  been  the  product  of  auto-hypnotic  dream- 
ing, of  fleeing  from  the  actual  instead  of  wrestling  with  it  in  thought 
and  action. 

Reality  includes:  (1)  The  particular  empirical  existents  in  time 
and  space.  (2)  The  temporal,  spatial,  dynamic,  vital  and  whatever 
other  relations  there  are  which  constitute  the  interplay  of  particulars 
as  elements  in  the  cosmos.  Unreality  includes  everything  that  has 
no  corresponding  fact  in  the  natures  or  relations  of  the  existing  par- 
ticulars. It  includes  impossible,  contradictory  and  unmeaning 
images,  concepts  and  propositions,  which  are  so  because  incompatible 
with  the  actual.  Between  the  actual  real  and  the  unreal  is  the  realm 
of  the  possible — of  ideas  of  entities  which  are  not  incompatible  with 
the  actual  order,  but  for  which  no  corresponding  existents  have  yet 
been  found.  "The  possible  is  really  possible" — this  means  its  exist- 
ence is  not  excluded  by  the  actual. 

Hans  Driesch,  in  his  Ordnungslehre,  distinguishes  between  the 
doctrine  of  order  and  metaphysics.  The  doctrine  of  order  is  a  sys- 
tematic doctrine  of  the  categories.  It  deals  with  the  forms  of  ideal 
objects  of  thought  (logic  and  mathematics)  as  well  as  with  the  forms 
of  interpretation  of  existential  objects;  whereas  metaphysics  is  con- 
cerned with  the  relation  of  knowledge  and  existence.  Thus  Ord- 
nungslehre is  very  similar  in  aim  to  Gegenstandstheorie  and  to 
Phenomenology  as  Husserl  conceives  it.  Driesch  has  since  published 
a  Metaphysics,  WvrlclichJceitslehre,  which  I  have  not  seen.14 

14 1  have  not  aimed  above,  either  to  expound  Meinong  's  views  adequately  or 
to  criticise  them  in  detail.  I  have  taken  them  as  a  starting  point  for  discussing 
the  notion  of  subsistence  which  plays  such  a  large  role  in  the  abstract  logical 
realism  of  certain  neo-realists ;  notably  so,  for  example  in  E.  G.  Spaulding's 
The  New  Rationalism.  B.  Russell  expounded  and  discussed  Meinong 's  theories 
in  three  articles  in  Mind,  N.  S.,  Vol.  xiii,  pp.  204  ff.,  336  ff.,  and  509  ff., 
entitled  ' '  Meinong 's  Theory  of  Complexes  and  Assumptions. ' '  As  this  volume 
goes  to  press  I  note  the  first  installment  of  an  article  on  "The  Philosophical 
Researches  of  Meinong"  by  G.  Dawes  Hicks,  in  Mind  (N.  S.)  Vol.  xxxi,  No.  1, 
January,  1922,  pp.  1-30. 


CHAPTEK  III 


PERCEPTS    AND    CONCEPTS 


Certain  thinkers,  notably,  William  James  and  H.  Bergson,  who 
insist  on  the  validity  of  immediate  perceptual  experience  as  being 
the  primary  datum  for  philosophy,  argue  that  in  the  conceptualiz- 
ing process  the  mind  is  carried,  not  deeper  into,  but  farther  away 
from,  reality.  Percepts  are  characterized  as  concrete  and  dynamic, 
continuous  with  the  original  and  ever  varying  flow  of  living 
reality;  whereas  concepts  are  static,  abstract,  pale  shadows  or 
skeletons  which  misrepresent  the  rich  flux  of  experience,  which  is 
the  real  stuff  of  things. 

I  regard  this  opposition  of  perception  and  conception  as  erron- 
eous. Certainly,  all  knowledge  arises  from  the  determinate  data 
of  experience.  Certainly  too,  all  our  valid  concepts,  our  most  high- 
flown  theories,  must  dip  back  into  and  be  continuous  with  living 
experience.  But  there  is  no  part  of  experience,  however  simple 
and  dumb  it  may  seem,  that  does  not  involve  in  some  degree  the 
organizing  and  interpreting  activity  of  thought.  The  crude  per- 
ception of  a  physical  thing  is  an  act  of  synthesis  of  sense  quali- 
ties into  a  recognizable  unity.  In  perceiving  a  stone,  the  self 
recognizes  the  existence  of  a  unified  complex  of  sense  qualities. 
It  could  not  recognize  the  thinghood  of  the  stone  if  it  could  not  be 
conscious  of  the  unity  of  its  own  act  in  identifying  the  stone.  It 
cannot  be  conscious  of  its  own  unity  without,  at  the  same  time, 
recognizing  the  existence  of  other  units — things  and  selves.  The 
self  places  the  stone  somewhere  in  space.  This  implies  the  con- 
sciousness of  relating  the  self's  experience  in  an  order  of  things  in 
space.  The  self  recognizes  the  existence  of  the  stone  now  and  then. 
This  implies  the  consciousness  of  the  self  and  other  entities,  as 
existing  through  a  temporal  succession,  and  of  time  as  the  order 
in  which  events  occur  and  exist.  The  causal  relation  arises  from 
recognition  of  the  influences  which  the  self  suffers  and  exerts  in 
a  world  of  orderly  events  in  time.     The  categories,  in  terms  of 

44 


PERCEPTS  AND  CONCEPTS  45 

which  man  classifies  and  organizes  the  elements  of  his  experiences, 
are  engendered  by  the  interplay  of  his  conceptualizing  intelligence 
with  the  world  of  sense  data.  The  materials  of  sense  perception 
submit  to  the  organizing  activity  of  thought.  Through  the  organ- 
ization of  the  empirical  facts  the  world  becomes  more  articulate 
and  significant,  becomes,  in  short,  a  cosmos ;  and  the  self  in  turn 
becomes  more  fully  conscious  of  its  own  intelligent  nature.  The 
basic  processes  of  human  intelligence  must  be  akin  to  the  structure 
of  a  world  thus  apprehended,  in  all  its  variegated  and  colorful 
data,  by  the  activity  of  thought.  Nature,  the  experienced  world 
order,  is  an  orderly  whole.  The  subject  becomes  a  consciously 
rational  self  through  its  work  of  organizing,  interpreting,  evalu- 
ating and  controlling,  the  natural  order.  In  finding  order  or  law 
and  in  achieving  values  in  the  world,  the  self  is  holding  intercourse 
with  the  order  of  reality.  No  impassable  gulf  can  be  admitted  to 
yawn  between  experience  and  thought,  perception  and  conception. 
Our  concepts  work  pragmatically.  They  are  significant,  because 
the  intelligence  which  shapes  them  is  organic  to  the  world  and  the 
world  is  harmonious  with  intelligence. 

Genuine  concepts  are  not  pale  and  colorless  abstracts  of  prop- 
erties common  to  the  objects  which  concepts  at  once  denote  and 
connote.  A  concept  is  not  a  generic  image,  although  a  generic 
image,  a  composite  photograph  may  furnish  the  imaginal  setting 
of  a  concept.  The  true  concept  is  a  principle  of  order,  a  law  of  a 
series,  a  relating  function.  The  term  which  expresses  the  concept 
is  simply  the  symbol  of  the  principle  of  order  which  is  exemplified 
in  a  series  of  differentiations  or  particular  embodiments  of  iden- 
tical qualities.  The  true  concept  of  man  or  justice,  for  example,  is 
a  functional  meaning  which  signifies  an  order-series  by  which 
individual  entities  are  members  of  a  group  or  orderly  system. 
These  concepts  do  not  "mean"  that  there  is  a  finite  number  of 
personal  qualities  in  men  or  of  acts  called  "just,"  which  are 
included  under  or  ruled  by  the  class  concept  "man"  or  "justice." 
The  concept  of  man  is  the  function  or  principle  of  order  which  is 
expressed  differentially  in  a  serial  succession  of  particular  indi- 
viduals. The  concept  of  justice  expresses  the  rule  or  law  for  the 
continuous  production  and  recognition  of  a  series  of  typical  acts, 
each  act  unique  but  with  a  qualification  identical  with  every  other 
act  of  the  same  character.  Thus  genuine  concepts  are  the  forms 
or  types  of  order  which  express,  in  mental  symbols,  the  principles 


46  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

of  the  behavior  and  production  of  ordered  series  of  particulars. 
They  are  laws  of  series. 

Each  concept  is  an  individualized  law  or  type  for  the  arrange- 
ment, in  a  series,  of  an  indefinite  succession  of  particulars.     If  I 
have  an  adequate  concept  of  man  or  justice,  I  am  thus  able,  out 
of  the  mass  of  my  experiences,  to  group  and  order  as  they  appear ; 
or,  in  the  case  of  concepts  of  action  such  as  justice,  to  produce 
the  new  and  unique  particulars  of  which  these  concepts  are  the 
types.     The  concept  then  of  any  type  of  being  symbolizes  the  law 
of  behavior  of  the  individual  being  as  member  of  an  order-series 
or  type.     The  states  of  any  being  of  that  type  function  in  the 
specific  typical  relations.    The  biological  concept  of  man  expresses 
the  laws  of  behavior  of  the  human  species  as  a  member  of  the 
ordered  series  of  animal  forms.    The  psychological  concept  of  man 
expresses  the  laws  of  his  behavior  as  member  of  the  ordered  series 
of  sentient  types  of  life.     The  ethical  and  social  concept  of  man 
expresses  the  laws  of  his  behavior  as  member  of  well-ordered  groups, 
namely  the  social  groups.     The  complete  concept  of  man  would 
express  all  the  laws  of  his  behavior,  all  the  ways  in  which  human 
beings  function  in  the  totality  of  relations  in  which  they  live.    We 
cannot  exhaust  the  individual's  existence  in  terms  of  his  conceptual 
relations ;  hence  there  remain  facts  in  our  acquaintance  with  indi- 
viduals  which   we  know   immediately   by   experience   or   direct 
acquaintance,   and  through  which  we  appreciate  the  individual 
directly  as  this  concretion-point  of  relations.     Our  inability  to 
form  a  perfect  concept  of  an  individual  is  due  to  the  complexity 
of  the  relations  in  which  individuals  live  and  act,  and  not  to  any 
irreconcilable    opposition    between    immediate    experience    and 
thought.    It  is  possible  that  a  perfect  intelligence  would  possess  a 
complete  concept,  or  law  of  behavior,  for  every  individual.     The 
true  function  of  concepts  is  to  symbolize  dynamic  relations  of  the 
determinate    elements    of    reality.      The    genuine    concepts    are 
transcriptions  into  mental  symbols  of  the  ordered  or  serial  char- 
acter of  a  world  which  has  a  relational  structure.     Plato's  Ideas, 
in  their  relations  to  the  particulars  of  sense,  were  probably  in- 
tended as  ordering  concepts  in  the  meaning  I  have  given  to  the 
term.      Whether   he   regarded    them    as   eternally   existing    and 
transcendent  types  of  order,  I  cannot  discuss  here. 

Since  they  are  functions  of  order  or  laws  of  a  series,  concepts 
are  dynamic.    It  is  true,  that  having  acquired,  by  our  own  activity, 


PERCEPTS  AND  CONCEPTS  47 

or  by  inheritance  from  tradition,  certain  concepts,  we  may  stop 
thinking  and  regard  these  products  of  arrested  intellectual  activity 
as  absolute  and  perfect  types.  Thus,  by  failing  to  carry  on  the 
work  of  thought,  our  apparatus  of  concepts  may  come  to  fall  far 
short  of  the  living  realities  whose  nature  they  should  express. 
But  this  defect  of  our  actual  conceptual  furniture  is  not  due  to 
any  inherent  defect  in  conceptual  thinking,  but  to  the  arrest 
thereof,  to  our  failure  to  reorganize  our  symbols  and  our  meanings 
and  bring  them  into  harmony  with  the  further  findings  of  experi- 
ence and  with  other  concepts  that  arise  therefrom.  In  fact  it  is 
the  ordinary  naive  percepts,  which  consist  so  largely  of  traditional 
images  and  concepts,  the  products  of  arrested  and  ossified  thinking, 
that  are  static  and  inadequate  to  the  flow  of  experience.  The 
clodhopper  does  not  perceive  what  the  scientist,  the  scholar,  or  the 
philosopher  perceives,  just  because  what  he  thinks  he  perceives  is 
so  largely  made  up  of  traditional  images  and  concepts.  He  per- 
ceives what  he  thinks  he  perceives  because  he  does  not  think.  For 
him  physical  things  are  simply  inert  masses.  Fossils  are  but 
curious  bits  of  rock  that  tell  no  stories.  The  earth  stands  still,  the 
sun  revolves  around  it.  Miracles  happen,  events  shoot  forth 
mysteriously  and  without  adequate  causes.  Charms  and  the  evil 
eye  work;  magic  stalks  abroad.  The  dead  appear  to  the  living. 
Organs  are  repaired  and  bones  are  mended  by  faith.  Soothsaying 
is  a  valid  form  of  knowledge.  Almost  anything  may  happen,  and 
all  because  he  implicitly  takes  as  veridical  sense  perception,  a 
topsy-turvydom  of  primitive  tradition,  of  imagery  and  belief  which 
chimes  in  with  his  own  uncriticized  desires,  hopes  and  fears.  He 
does  his  perceiving  with  a  primitive  conceptual  outfit.  On  the 
other  hand,  it  is  the  persistent  conceptual  activity  of  thought 
which  discovers  order,  continuity  and  movement,  beneath  the 
apparent  disorder,  discontinuity  and  inertia  of  those  crude  per- 
ceptual experiences  which  are  really  made  up  largely  of  prehistoric 
concepts.  It  is  through  conceptual  thinking  alone  that  we  find  in 
nature  a  regular  causal  succession,  continuous  evolution,  ceaseless 
movement  beneath  the  apparently  placid  surface  of  things;  in 
short,  in  place  of  chaos,  cosmos,  an  orderly  world  of  elements  in 
dynamic  relations.  It  is  not  conceptual  thinking,  in  its  fresh 
analysis  and  synthesis  of  experiences,  which  dismembers  the  rich 
and  concrete  flux  of  living  reality,  which  turns  the  green  and 
golden  tree  of  life  into  gray  dead  theory.     This  devastation  is 


48  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

wrought  by  unthinking  perception  masquerading  in  the  outworn 
garments  of  primitive  imagery  and  concepts. 

James  says,1  "Out  of  this  aboriginal  sensible  muchness  atten- 
tion carves  out  objects,  which  conception  then  names  and  identifies 
forever — "  .  .  .  "Out  of  time  we  cut  'days'  and  'nights/  'sum- 
mers' and  'winters.'  We  say  what  each  part  of  the  sense  continuum 
is  and  all  these  abstracted  whats  are  concepts."  But  "time"  is 
surely  a  much  more  abstract  concept  than  "day"  or  "night," 
"day"  more  abstract  than  the  "present"  moment.  I  can  form  a 
much  more  accurate  concept  of  what  the  present  moment  means 
than  I  can  of  what  time  means.  I  can  form  a  concept  of  "here," 
"now,"  "individuals"  such  as  myself,  "President  of  the  United 
States,"  "King  of  England,"  the  sun,  Mercury,  Venus,  this  solar 
system.  Indeed  all  historical  sciences,  whether  it  be  human  his- 
tory, historical  biology,  geology,  or  astronomy,  operate  with  con- 
cepts of  individuals.  Each  individual  has  its  unique  character 
and  place  in  space  and  time,  but  that  does  not  hinder  its  being 
conceived  in  all  sorts  of  relations  of  qualities,  action,  passion,  co- 
existence and  succession,  with  other  individuals.  Our  most  com- 
prehensive concepts  or  categories  are  formed  by  putting  together 
more  concrete  concepts.  It  is  from  "now"  and  "then,"  "day" 
and  "night,"  "summer"  and  "winter,"  that  we  can  form  the  con- 
cept of  time.  So  with  space,  cause,  identity,  truth,  justice,  beauty, 
value,  relation.  These  metaphysical  concepts  or  categories  sym- 
bolize identities  of  character  and  behavior  which  constitute  con- 
crete individuals  members  of  ordered  series. 

The  consideration  of  the  relation  between  perception  and  con- 
ception has  brought  us  into  the  heart  of  the  problem  of  the  indi- 
vidual and  the  universal.  Those  who  argue  that  thought  murders 
reality  regard  the  individual  as  given  in  perception  and  the  uni- 
versal as  an  abstraction  formed  by  thought  from  the  perceptual 
reality.  We  shall  consider  fully  the  relation  of  the  individual  and 
the  universal  in  a  later  chapter.2  I  may  say  here,  by  anticipation, 
that  the  truest,  richest,  realest  individual  is  the  one  which  implies 
or  concretes  the  most  universals.  The  individual  is  the  concretion 
of  universals.     Universals  are  the  relations  of  individuals. 


1  Problems  of  Philosophy,  p.  50. 
'Chap.  14. 


CHAPTER  IV 


THE    CRITERIA   OF   KNOWLEDGE 


When  one  asks  "What  is  truth  ?"  one  must  beware  of  confusing 
two  different  questions.  These  are:  (1)  What  are  the  subjective 
or  psychological  marks  of  truth,  how  does  truth  "feel"  to  the  indi- 
vidual knower?  (2)  What  are  the  objective  logical  criteria  or 
universal  standards  for  determining  the  truth  of  propositions? 
Propositions  or  judgments  have  two  aspects:  (1)  They  are  made 
or  accepted  and  believed  by  individuals  and  thus  are  mental  acts 
or  attitudes;  (2)  they  are,  if  true,  objective  and  universal — their 
meanings  agree  with  the  universal  conditions  of  truth  and  the 
specific  character  of  reality.  For  example,  when  the  pragmatist 
says  that  "satisfaction"  or  "satisfactory  consequences"  is  the  mark 
of  true  propositions,  he  is  stating  only  a  subjective  or  psychological 
mark  of  propositions,  as  believed  or  held  to  be  true  by  individuals. 

Judgments  are  beliefs,  and  the  belief  attitude  involves  feeling 
or  sentiment.  Hence  Hume  says  that  belief  belongs  more  properly 
to  the  sensitive  than  to  the  rational  part  of  our  nature  and  Pascal 
that  the  heart  has  reasons  which  the  intellect  knows  not  of.  If  all 
beliefs  had  their  motives  for  being  held  wholly  in  feeling  there 
would  be  no  objective  content  of  truth.  All  science  and  philosophy 
would  be  reduced  to  the  subjectivity  of  the  individual  "feeler." 
But,  in  fact,  while  many  beliefs,  such  as,  for  example,  a  person's 
belief  in  himself  or  in  his  sweetheart  or  friend,  may  be  based 
chiefly  on  feeling,  there  are  beliefs  which  are  held  because  of 
empirical  evidence  or  logical  deduction  from  such  evidence. 
These  are  rational  beliefs,  based  on  intellectual  judgments. 

Here  we  are  concerned  with  the  problem  of  the  objective  or 
logical  criteria  of  truth,  and  we  shall  now  examine  the  principal 
theories  on  this  subject.  These  are:  (1)  the  "copy"  or  reprer- 
sentative  theory;  (2)  the  intuitional  or  immediatist  theory;  (3) 
the  coherence  theory;  and  (4)  the  pragmatic  theory.  The  "copy" 
or  "representative"  theory  is  sometimes  called  the  agreement  or 

49 


50  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

correspondence  theory — mistakenly,  I  think,  since  "agreement" 
is  too  vague  and  all-inclusive  a  term  to  designate  a  specific  theory 
of  truth.  We  would  all  agree  that  our  beliefs,  to  be  true,  must  be 
in  agreement  with  reality ;  the  crucial  question  is — how  this  agree- 
ment is  to  be  achieved  and  known.  In  the  copy  theory  agreement 
means  that  our  images,  ideas  and  judgments  are  true  when  they 
are  good  copies  or  representations  of  reality,  just  as  a  portrait  of 
an  absent  friend  is  a  good  one  if  it  copies  his  appearance.  This 
theory  has  its  origin  in  the  fact  that  the  mind,  through  memory, 
forms  images  of  things  experienced  in  the  past;  and,  through 
creative  imagination  and  thought,  forms  images  and  conceptual 
symbols  of  things  not  experienced,  by  the  rearrangement  of  repro- 
duced imaginal  and  conceptual  elements ;  and  the  images  and  con- 
ceptual symbols  are  found  to  be  good  or  valid  representatives,  if 
they  lead  to  actual  experiences  that  agree  with  the  pointings  or 
meanings  of  their  imaginal  or  symbolic  representations.  Ob- 
viously, a  great  many  of  our  ideas,  regarded  as  meanings,  are  not 
copies  or  reproductions  of  empirical  things.  Scientific  and  tech- 
nical formulae  and  laws,  moral  and  political  concepts  and  prin- 
ciples, mathematical  concepts  and  relations,  are  not  copies  but 
conceptual  symbols  of  actual  and  possible  experiences  or  acts  and 
processes.  The  mental  content  in  such  cases  has  no  necessary 
imaginal  or  pictorial  resemblances  to  that  which  it  symbolizes.  A 
very  important  part  of  valid  knowledge  thus  consists,  not  of  repre- 
sentations or  copies,  but  of  conventionalized  signs  or  symbols. 

The  problem  of  knowledge  is  a  real  problem,  not  an  exercise 
in  hair  splitting.  For,  naively,  the  human  mind  assumes  offhand 
that  its  images,  concepts,  and  symbols  mean,  point  to,  lead  toward, 
the  real  things  which  they  stand  for.  But  what  common  sense 
means  by  the  "real  things"  are  just  the  perceptual  objects  which 
are  congeries  of  sense  data,  whose  character  is  determined  in  part 
by  the  structure  and  reactions  of  the  percipient.  It  is  easy  to  see 
that  images  and  symbols  are  valid  if  they  correspond  with  the 
sensual  data  which  they  mean  and  promise;  but,  since  the  sense 
data  are  themselves  variable,  what  real  things  do  they  represent  ? 
How  are  we  to  determine  to  what  extent  and  in  what  conditions 
our  sense  data  are  representations  of  reality  ?  How  can  the  per- 
cipient transcend  his  private  sense  data  ?  By  what  criteria  can  he 
determine  whether  he  has,  in  a  given  instance,  transcended  his 
private  data  ? 


THE  CRITERIA  OF  KNOWLEDGE  51 

A  fatal  objection  to  the  copy  theory  is  this:  if  it  means  that 
every  cognitive  mental  content,  whether  sensory  or  ideational,  is  a 
re-presentation  of  a  reality  external  to  and  differing  from  it,  then 
we  have  no  means  of  knowing  whether  the  ''idea"  is  a  fair  copy  of 
the  reality.  Images  may  be  copies  of  percepts,  but  what  are  per- 
cepts copies  of,  if  they  too  are  ideas?  If  we  know  some  things  by 
direct  acquaintance  in  perception,  then  all  knowledge  does  not 
come  by  way  of  copying  things  in  representations.  If  we  do  not 
know  anything  by  direct  acquaintance,  then  we  have  no  means  of 
knowing  whether  any  of  our  so-called  copies  and  symbols  of  things 
and  relations  are  adequately  representative  of  the  supposed  inde- 
pendent realities.  Either  we  can  know  some  parts  of  reality  in 
some  other  way  than  by  our  ideas  copying  or  representing  them, 
or  we  do  not  know  whether  we  can  know  any  reality  as  it  really  is, 
or  to  what  degree  our  ideas  are  good  copies  or  symbols  of  the  reality. 

The  intuitionist  or  immediatist  theory  is  that  knowledge  con- 
sists in  intuiting,  in  having  a  direct  perception  of,  reality.  The 
essentials  of  the  theory  are  these:  I  have  immediate  or  direct 
acquaintance  with  external  reality  in  my  sense  perceptions.  I 
have  immediate  or  direct  acquaintance  with  internal  reality,  that 
is,  with  the  processes  of  mind,  by  introspection  or  the  inner  sense. 
Just  as  I  know  the  qualities  of  objects  through  sense  perception, 
so,  by  inner  reflection,  I  know  mental  processes,  their  various  con- 
tents, and  the  laws  of  their  connections.  The  principles  of  logical 
thinking,  the  principles  of  ethical,  social,  aesthetic,  and  religious 
valuations,  are  known  in  the  same  way.  It  is  sometimes  objected 
to  intuitionism  that  it  excludes  from  the  knowing  activity  all 
reflective  analyses.  This  objection  is  invalid.  The  claim  that  one 
can  know  by  intuition  the  nature  of  physical  things  and  the  nature 
of  mind  in  no  way  precludes  the  possibility  or  necessity  of  reflect- 
ive analysis  of  one's  intuitions.1 

The  weakness  of  intuitionism  lies  in  its  incompleteness,  in 
what  it  fails  to  include,  rather  than  in  what  it  positively  includes. 
Granted  that,  unless  we  know  some  things  intuitively,  or  imme- 
diately, we  cannot  be  sure  that  we  know  anything ;  granted  that,  if 
we  are  to  have  any  valid  knowledge  of  the  external  world,  we  must 
have  immediate  acquaintance  with  some  of  its  real  aspects  or  quali- 


1Cf.  N.  Lossky,  The  Intuitive  Basis  of  Knowledge ;  a  well-developed  argu- 
ment for  intuitivism.  All  genuine  realism  in  theory  of  knowledge  must  admit 
that  knowledge  has  an  intuitive  basis. 


52  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

ties  and  relations ;  and  granted,  too,  that  the  logical  operations  of 
the  mind,  the  basic  ways  of  judging,  must  be  known  by  intro- 
spective analysis;  intuitionalism  still  fails  to  give  an  adequate 
theory  of  scientific  and  philosophical  inquiry.  The  variations, 
inconsistencies  and  illusions  in  our  sense  perceptions  raise  the 
question — what  is  the  relation  of  our  varying  and  conflicting  ex- 
periences and  beliefs  to  the  objective  order  ?  A  number  of  some- 
what variant  perceptions  of  a  thing  may  be  regarded  as  aspects 
of  the  thing  cognizable.  What,  then,  is  the  relation  of  these 
aspects  to  the  real  thing?  Scientific  analysis  is  requisite  to 
answer  this  question.  Furthermore,  we  cannot  rest  satisfied  with 
the  enunciation  of  a  series  of  disconnected  judgments  in  regard  to 
physical,  vital,  logical,  mathematical,  ethical,  aesthetic  and  other 
facts  and  principles.  We  seek  to  organize  these  various  series  of 
facts-in-relation  into  a  harmonious  system.  Thought  seeks  con- 
sistent or  harmonious  systems  of  mathematical,  physical,  vital, 
social,  ethical,  aesthetic  judgments  or  propositions;  and  seeks,  fur- 
ther, to  determine  how  these  special  systems  may  be  intercon- 
nected; as  well  as  to  determine  how  the  mind's  general  norms  of 
judgment  are  interwoven  with,  and  give  meaning  and  unity  to,  the 
world  of  sense  experience.  The  coherence  theory  is  the  formula- 
tion of  this  impetus  of  thought. 

The  coherence  theory  of  truth  is  that  the  ultimate  criterion  of 
truth  is  the  mutual  coherence  or  harmonious  organization  of  judg- 
ments into  a  system.  Any  single  judgment  is  true  only  in  so  far 
as  it  enters  as  a  harmonious  element  into  a  more  completely 
articulated  organism  or  consistent  system  of  judgments.  "The 
Ideal  of  Knowledge  .  .  .  is 2  a  system,  not  of  truths,  but  of  truth." 
"The  essential  nature  of  thought  is  a  concrete  unity,  a  living  indi- 
viduality." "Truth,  in  its  essential  nature,  is  that  systematic 
coherence  which  is  the  character  of  a  significant  whole.  A  "sig- 
nificant whole"  is  an  organized  individual  experience,  self- 
fulfilling  and  self-fulfilled.  Its  organization  is  the  process  of  its 
self-fulfillment,  and  the  concrete  manifestation  of  its  individual- 
ity." The  judgmental  parts  or  single  truths  have  no  validity  in 
isolation  from  the  whole,  and  the  whole  is  in  and  through  the 


*  Joachim,  The  Nature  of  Truth,  p.  72. 

'Ibid.,  p.  78.     This  is  the  standpoint  of  F.  H.  Bradley,  B.  Bosanquet, 
and,  in  g<  n<  ral,  of  the  Anglo-American  objective  idealists. 
•Ibid.,  p.  76. 


THE  CRITERIA  OF  KNOWLEDGE  53 

parts.  The  notions  of  life,  organism,  self-fulfilling  process  bring 
us  nearest  to  a  conception  of  that  ideal  whole,  although  they  are 
all  inadequate.  There  can  be  one  and  only  one  significant  whole, 
one  organized  individual  experience  self-fulfilling  and  self-ful- 
filled. Nothing  short  of  absolute  individuality,  nothing  short  of 
the  completely  whole  experience  can  satisfy  this  postulate.  Hence 
the  truth  is,  from  the  point  of  view  of  human  experience,  an  ideal 
which  can  never,  in  its  completeness,  be  actual  as  human  experi- 
ence. As  to  the  relation  of  humanly  "true"  judgments  to  the  ideal 
whole  or  organism  of  absolute  truth,  our  true  judgments  are  all 
partial,  abstract  or  indeterminate  truths.  No  one  of  them  is  com- 
pletely true  when  taken  by  itself.  From  judgments  of  particular 
fact,  such  as  "this  paper  is  smooth,"  to  universal  judgments,  such 
as  "2  plus  2  =  4"  or  "the  law  of  gravitation  is  true  for  all  bodies," 
we  have  an  endless  series  of  degrees  of  truth,  degrees  of  approxima- 
tion to  the  one  and  complete  whole  of  truth.  One  true  judgment 
may  be  more  inclusive  of  other  truths,  and  therefore,  more  true, 
than  another  judgment.  No  judgment,  in  and  by  itself,  is  abso- 
lutely true.  The  degree  of  truth  possessed  by  any  judgment  is 
measured  by  its  systematic  inclusiveness  of  other  subordinate 
judgments.  A  judgment  is  most  true  when  it  is  most  determinate, 
when  its  background  is  most  vitally  articulated  as  a  system  of 
judgments,  into  which  the  judgment  in  question  fits  in  as  a  deter- 
mining and  determined  member.5  In  the  articulate  systems  of 
geometry  and  number,  in  the  physical  doctrine  of  energy,  in  a 
system  of  astronomical  principles  or  geological  principles,  in  the 
concrete  interpretation  of  social-historical  life  by  a  Dante  or  a 
Goethe,  or  of  the  Renaissance  by  a  great  historian,  we  have  a  fair 
sample  of  the  truest,  because  most  systematic  and  determinate, 
types  of  judgments.8 

The  coherence  theory  of  truth  embodies  the  ideal  goal  of 
science  and  philosophy.  If  there  be  any  absolutely  normative  ideal 
of  truth  this  is  it.  But  it  is  not  the  only  criterion  of  truth,  and 
often  it  is,  in  practice,  useless.  A  carping  critic  might  say  that,  if 
no  truth  is  wholly  true,  then  the  judgment  that  truth  is  coherence 
is  not  wholly  true.     But  the  advocate  of  the  coherence  theory 

'Ibid.,  p.  113. 

•  The  most  persuasive  expositions  of  this  doctrine  are  in  Bosanquet  's  Logic, 
especially  Vol.  II,  Chaps.  9  and  10,  and  The  Principle  of  Individuality  and 
Value,  passim. 


54  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

might  reply  that  no  justification  can  be  asked  for  a  criterion  of 
truth  except  that  it  states  what  the  characteristics  are,  that,  in 
varying  degrees,  actually  are  manifested  in  truth.  A  more  serious 
objection  to  the  coherence  criterion  is  that,  since  we  do  not  and 
cannot  know  the  absolute  totality  or  organism  of  truth,  since  we 
cannot  possess  the  one  whole  and  perfect  individual  system  of 
experience,  we  cannot  use  this  criterion  to  determine  the  degree  of 
truth  possessed  by  our  various  judgments  and  partial  systems  of 
judgment.  We  cannot  even  determine  by  it  the  relative  validity 
of  various  truths  in  different  partial  or  finite  systems,  each  of 
which  may  be  coherent  with  other  judgments  within  its  own  par- 
ticular system.  I  am  now  immediately  certain  that  I  (whatever 
"I"  may  be)  am  writing  in  my  study.  I  am  certain,  in  the  same 
manner,  of  the  general  character  of  my  immediate  physical  sur- 
roundings. I  am  also  certain  of  the  truth  of  some  propositions  in 
mathematics;  certain  too,  of  a  few  values  in  human  relationships, 
literature  and  art;  and  I  regard  some  historical  facts  as  highly 
credible.  But  I  have  not  the  least  inkling,  perhaps,  as  to  how 
these  various  types  of  judgment  systems,  enter,  as  factors,  into  the 
absolute  whole  of  truth.  I  may  and  do  hope  and  believe  that, 
somehow,  all  true  judgments  concerning  reality  must  cohere  into 
one  whole  or  individual  system ;  since,  otherwise,  reality  cannot  be 
a  perfectly  intelligible  order,  and  hence  not  a  cosmos,  a  universe 
at  all.  But,  since  I  do  not  and  cannot  know  this  one  coherent 
whole,  in  its  concrete  individuality,  I  do  not  know,  either  that  the 
ideal  of  truth  is  fully  honored  by  reality,  or  what  particular  place 
any  specific  finite  judgments,  or  systems  of  judgments,  may  occupy 
in  the  perfect  whole.  Thus  the  coherence  theory,  while  it  expresses 
an  ideal  that  guides  thought  and  that,  so  far  as  it  is  applicable,  is 
absolute,  cannot  be  the  only  working  criterion  of  truth.  On  the 
other  hand,  obedience  to  the  ideal  of  coherence,  freedom  from  con- 
tradicl  ion  in  a  systematic  whole,  or  harmonious  totality,  is  the  most 
imperious  and  inescapable  principle  that  controls  thought. 

A  third  objection  to  the  coherence  theory  is  that  thought  might 
build  up  ideally  or  formally  coherent  systems  of  judgments,  in 
which  each  member  of  the  system  might  fit  beautifully  into  the 
articulated  whole,  while  the  whole  structure  was  out  of  touch  with 
reality  or,  at  best,  might  be  a  beautiful  system  of  bare  possibilities. 
In  transcendental  geometries,  in  ultraromantic  theories  of  life, 
in  the  religions  illusions  of  demented  persons,  and  in  speculations 


THE  CRITERIA  OF  KNOWLEDGE  55 

in  regard  to  the  life  after  death,  we  find  such  systems.  The  reply 
to  this  criticism  is  that  the  ideal  is  not  one  of  formal  consistency 
of  propositions  concerning  reality  in  the  abstract,  but  of  coherence, 
organic  wholeness,  or  harmonious  individuality,  in  experience 
regarded  as  a  socially  valid  system.  In  short,  the  coherence  theory 
means  that  our  judgments  must  symbolize  or  be  harmonious  with 
all  aspects  of  reality.  Coherence  with  empirical  fact  must  be  our 
starting  point,  and  membership  in  society  is  a  stubborn  fact. 
Therefore,  the  coherence  theory  must  presuppose  that  experience 
is  in  touch  with  reality.  It  cannot  blow  hot  and  cold.  It  cannot 
start  with  the  faith  in  the  trustworthiness  of  immediate  experience 
aud  then,  by  a  dialectic  use  of  its  criterion,  undermine  the  validity 
of  immediate  experience.7  If  it  does  this  it  defeats  itself.  The 
objects  of  belief  in  judgments  are,  in  the  last  analysis,  not  proposi- 
tions about  reality  but  reality  itself.  There  is  a  duality  in  knowl- 
edge. A  true  judgment  or  belief  is  the  presence  in  a  mind  of  a 
meaning  symbolized,  a  conscious  intent  signified,  tliat  refers,  in 
right  relations,  to  a  reality  other  than  itself;  and  which,  as  object 
of  belief,  is  existential ly  distinct  from  the  judgment  itself.  True 
propositions  are  always  mental  but  their  objects  need  not  be 
mental.  Hence,  even  an  absolute  whole  of  truth  must  be  a  coherent 
system  of  judgments  or  meanings  which  constitute  a  consciousness 
or  awareness  in  which  these  judgments  function.  Truth  then  must 
be  inunanent  vn  reality.  There  must  be  a  dynamic  commerce 
between  the  knower  and  the  objects  of  knowledge.  Both  must  be 
reciprocally  functioning  factors  in  one  world. 

Pragmatism,  or  instrumentalism,  criticises  the  coherence 
theory  as  useless  in  application,  and  professes,  for  its  own  part, 
to  offer  a  clear  working  conception  of  the  dynamic  commerce  be- 
tween ideas  and  realities,  by  virtue  of  which  ideas  become  true,  o~" 
the  reverse.  The  pragmatist  or  instrumentalist  insists  that  ideas 
are  immanent  agents,  dynamic  instruments,  in  the  making  and 
remaking  of  experience.  The  function  of  ideas  is  not  to  copy  or 
represent  particular  things,  nor  is  it  the  function  of  truth  to  be  an 
"ideally"  harmonious  or  coherent  mental  replica  of  reality.  In- 
deed the  pragmatist  thinks  that,  since  reality  is  muddy,  incoherent 
and  ever  flowing,  true  ideas  can  never  be  parts  of  one  coherent 
timeless  whole  of  truth. 

1  As  Bradley  seems  to  do  with  respect,  especially,  to  the  temporal  character 
of  experience. 


56  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

The  pragmatist  says  that  a  true  proposition  is  always  one  that 
leads  to  satisfactory  consequences  of  some  sort  to  some  person  or 
persons.  And,  by  satisfactory  consequences,  he  means  all  sorts  of 
satisfactions.  If  A  believes  that  B  will  lend  him  a  thousand 
dollars,  which  he  badly  needs,  on  his  note,  and  B  actually  lends 
him  the  money,  then  A's  belief  becomes  true,  because  it  has  the 
anticipated  satisfactory  consequence.  But  the  belief,  pragmat- 
ically, is  not  true  until  B  has  actually  agreed  to  loan  the  sum  in 
question  to  A.  It  is  true  just  in  so  far,  and  as  soon,  as  the  belief 
leads  into  the  expected  results.  If  the  law  of  gravitation  becomes 
true  it  will  be  because  the  belief  in  it  will  have  satisfactory  con- 
sequences and  disbelief  in  it  disastrous  consequences.  If  A  loves 
B  and  believes  that  B  loves  him,  and  if  B  reciprocates  the  affection, 
the  consequences  again  are  satisfactory  and  the  belief  becomes  true. 
The  proof  of  the  pudding  is  in  the  eating.  If  belief  in  a  theorem 
in  algebra  or  geometry  will  lead  to  the  satisfactory  consequence 
that  it  will  harmonize  with  other  theorems,  and,  perhaps,  will  have 
application  in  engineering,  the  theorem  thus  becomes  true,  but  it 
was  not  true  until  the  good  consequences  ensued. 

The  pragmatic  method  starts  from  the  postulate  that  there  is  no 
difference  of  truth  that  doesn't  make  a  difference  of  fact  somewhere ; 
and  it  seeks  to  determine  the  meaning  of  all  differences  of  opinion 
by  making  the  discussion  hinge,  as  soon  as  possible,  upon  some 
practical  or  particular  issue.  The  principle  of  pure  experience  is  also 
a  methodical  postulate.  Nothing  shall  be  admitted  as  fact,  it  says, 
except  what  can  be  experienced  at  some  definite  time  by  some  experi- 
ent,  and  for  every  feature  of  fact  so  experienced,  a  definite  place  must 
be  found  somewhere  in  the  final  system  of  reality.  In  other  words, 
everything  real  must  be  experienceable  somewhere,  and  every  kind  of 
thing  experienced  must  be  somewhere  real.8 

In  short,  the  sole  test  of  the  truth  of  ideas  or  propositions  is 
to  be  found  in  their  practical  working  values.  "By  their  fruits  ye 
shall  know  them."  If  the  fruit  is  good  the  ideas  become  true.  If 
the  fruit  is  rotten,  or  produces  a  stomach  ache,  the  ideas  are  false. 
And  by  good  fruits  the  pragmatist  means  future  satisfactory 
experiences.  The  pragmatist  means,  when  he  substitutes  for 
static  "verity,"  dynamic  "verifiability,"  "workableness,"  or  "cash 
value"  in  concrete  experiences,  that  the  claims  to  truth  on  the  part 


8  William  James,  A  FluraUsHc  Universe,  p.  372. 


THE  CRITERIA  OF  KNOWLEDGE  57 

of  ideas  and  propositions  must  be  tested  by  the  consequences  which 
they  lead  to  in  the  way  of  further  experiences,  and  that  the  fruitage 
of  an  idea  or  proposition  in  concrete  empirical  value  is  the  only 
measure  of  its  truth.  Thus  he  states  what  is  obviously  the  inductive 
method  of  procedure ;  an  idea  or  proposition  is  a  working  hypothe- 
sis which  is  to  be  either  corroborated  or  refuted  by  future  empirical 
results. 

The  pragmatist  is  clearly  right  in  saying  that,  in  the  long  run 
and  taking  account  of  the  social  and  physical  relations  and  effects 
of  belief,  true  beliefs  are  those  which  will  yield  solid  and  lasting 
satisfactions;  yield  experimental  and  technical  satisfactions  in 
science  and  industry ;  yield  practical  emotional  satisfactions  in  the 
supplying  of  man's  daily  wants ;  yield  satisfactions  to  the  demands 
of  his  aesthetic,  intellectual  and  moral  nature. 

But  the  pragmatist  has  only  told  us  that,  if  we  try  to  verify  our 
beliefs,  by  reference  of  propositions  deduced  from  them  to  further 
experiences  and  to  further  actions  and  future  feelings,  either  we 
shall  verify  them  or  we  shall  not  verify  them.  Verified  beliefs  are 
satisfactory  to  the  believer;  refuted  beliefs  are  unsatisfactory; 
but  unrefuted  beliefs  may  be  satisfactory  and  yet  false.  A  person 
may  get  much  enjoyment  from  illusions  and  hallucinations ;  in  fact 
most  of  us  do  some  of  the  time  and  some  of  us  all  or  nearly  all  of 
the  time.  Human  beings  are  particularly  prone  to  cherishing 
illusions  in  regard  to  their  own  abilities,  characters  and  even  looks. 
These  illusions  are  often  very  agreeable. 

Certainly,  we  can  only  know  that  a  proposition  is  true  by  find- 
ing that  it  works  well  in  some  present  or  future  context  of  action, 
thought,  and  feeling.  But  a  proposition  can  only  work  satisfac- 
torily if  it  be  true,  that  is,  if  it  agree  with  fact  and  reason.  The 
satisfaction  that  follows  from  belief  in  a  given  proposition  depends, 
not  on  the  believer's  pious  belief  in  it,  nor  on  the  psychical  proposi- 
tion as  an  entertained  mental  content  but  on  the  truth  of  the  prop- 
position.  If  I  believe  a  proposition,  and  it  has  permanently  satis- 
factory consequences,  there  must  have  been  some  truth  in  the 
proposition,  but  that  truth  was  determined,  not  by  my  belief  that 
it  would  have  satisfactory  results  but,  by  the  nature  of  things 
themselves  with  which  my  belief  happened  to  agree. 

There  are  several  ambiguities  lurking  in  the  way  of  prag- 
matism, for  it  attempts  answers  to  at  least  three  distinct  problems. 
First  is  the  problem  of  a  method  of  procedure,  the  verification  of 


58  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

ideas  and  propositions.  The  pragmatic  postulate,  that  differences 
in  the  meanings  and  applications  of  ideas  must  correspond  to  dif- 
ferences of  fact  somewhere,  somehow,  and  that  if  ideas  have  no 
differences  in  empirical  consequences  thej  must  really  mean  the 
same  thing,  is  a  wholly  sound  method  of  procedure,  so  far  as  it  can 
be  applied.  Indeed,  it  is  just  the  empirical  method.  It  is  true 
that  the  ambiguity  lurks  in  the  word  "makes" ;  most  human  ideas 
do  not  make  the  facts  or  laws  to  which  they  correspond,  if  true. 
But  ideas,  in  the  shape  of  purposes  and  volitions,  are  dynamic 
facts  which  do  alter  the  relation  between  other  facts,  and  thus  to 
some  extent  remake,  or  make  over  real  facts.  But  even  the 
volitional  transformations  of  reality  are  subject  to  the  actual  struc- 
ture of  reality  as  a  whole.  Volition  works  successfully  within  the 
narrow  limits  prescribed  by  the  determinate  constitution  of  reality. 
When  Thomas  Carlyle  heard  that  Margaret  Fuller  Ossoli,  the 
transcendentalist,  had  accepted  the  universe,  he  said:  "Gad,  she'd 
better." 

The  pragmatist  assumes,  as  William  James  puts  it,  that 
"reality  is  in  the  making  and  awaits  a  part  of  its  complexion  from 
the  future." 

No  doubt  reality  is,  to  some  extent,  always  in  the  making,  but 
the  materials,  and  the  ways  of  successful  making,  are  not  created 
by  human  wishes.  They  belong  to  the  objective  order  which  makes 
our  ideas  either  true  or  false. 

The  second  problem  is,  in  contrast  to  the  statement  of  a  method 
of  verification,  the  problem  of  the  criteria  of  truth.  The  pragmatic 
answer  to  this  problem  is  that  the  criterion  is  satisfactoriness, 
agreeableness,  good  fruits,  or  cash  value.  But  he  neglects  to  tell 
us  how  we  are  to  know  good  fruits  from  bad  fruits,  genuine  cash 
from  counterfeits,  etc.,  in  any  other  terms  than  satisfyingness, 
agreeableness.  James  said  the  criterion  is  all  kinds  of  satisfac- 
tions, affectional,  aesthetic,  moral  and  logical.  What  is  the 
criterion  of  genuine  and  lasting  satisfactoriness?  How  is  one  to 
know  when  a  belief  in  a  theoretical  proposition  or  a  practical  plan, 
which  in  its  inception  and  embracement  is  enjoyable,  will  continue 
to  yield  intellectual  or  emotional  gratification  ?  "All  is  not  gold 
that  glitters";  "far  off  pastures  are  green";  "things  are  what  they 
are,  and  they  will  be  what  they  will  be."  In  admitting  that  con- 
sistency or  coherence  between  ideas  and  beliefs,  is  the  most  imperi- 
ous claimant  of  all,  James  really  deviated  from  pure  pragmatism. 


THE  CRITERIA  OF  KNOWLEDGE  59 

Later  pragmatists  or  instrumentalists,  notably  Mr.  Dewey,  make 
value  for  the  furtherance  of  social  welfare  and  individual  happi- 
ness the  most  comprehensive  criterion  of  satisfactoriness  or  truth. 
But  while  most  reasonable  human  beings  agree  that  the  highest 
criteria  of  moral  and  social  principles  are  social  welfare  and  indi- 
vidual happiness,  they  disagree  with  regard  to  what  constitutes 
social  welfare  and  happiness,  just  as  they  disagree  as  to  what 
constitutes  lasting  satisfaction.  Moreover,  there  are  many  proposi- 
tions in  symbolic  logic,  higher  mathematics,  physics,  astronomy, 
other  sciences,  history,  art,  et  cetera,  which  have  no  obvious  bearing 
on  social  welfare  or  even  on  individual  happiness.  What,  for 
instance,  are  the  social  consequences  or  satisfactions  which  make 
true  Bertrand  Russell's  philosophy  of  mathematics,  or  Einstein's 
theory  of  the  relativity  of  space  and  time,  if  they  are  true  ?  In 
what  respect  do  these  things  add  to  the  gayety  of  nations  or  indi- 
viduals ?  Must  we  wait  to  see  how  they  can  be  applied  in  further- 
ing democracy,  or  in  industry,  to  decide  whether  these  theories  are 
true  or  not  ?  Are  we  to  decide  whether  immortality,  spiritualism, 
or  materialism,  are  true  or  false,  simply  by  asking:  Which 
alternative  would  probably  give  most  happiness  to  the  largest 
number  of  human  beings  ?  If  feelings  of  satisfaction  or  happiness 
are  the  most  ultimate  criteria  of  the  truth  of  propositions,  then 
the  truest  propositions  are  those  for  which  the  majority  votes,  and 
many  propositions  and  values  in  such  fields  as  higher  mathematics, 
logic  and  metaphysics,  astral  physics,  history  and  art,  are  neither 
true  nor  false,  but  insignificant,  since  only  a  very  small  minority 
entertain  them  at  all  and  derive  pallid  pleasures  from  them.  They 
are  both  practically  useless  and  perhaps  unpalatable  truths.  (I 
have  very  seldom  derived  any  satisfaction  from  the  deliverances  of 
the  comptometer  at  my  bank,  but  I  have  invariably  found  its 
results  to  be  annoyingly  correct.)  We  may  hope  that  somehow  and 
somewhere  every  true  proposition  will  yield  satisfaction,  but  we  do 
not  know  that  this  is  so.  The  pragmatist  says  that  an  idea,  to  be 
true,  must  make  a  difference  in  reality.  Certainly  it  must  always 
make  a  difference  to  us  in  our  relations  to  other  parts  of  reality 
whether  our  ideas  are  true.  Our  ideas,  if  true,  must  lead  to  conse- 
quences of  some  sort;  otherwise,  they  are  otiose  and  unmeaning. 
False  beliefs  also  lead  to  consequences,  sometimes  agreeable  and 
sometimes  not.  But  ideas  and  beliefs  can  work  well  in  the  long 
run  for  the  individual  and  society  only  if  they  are  in  harmony  with 


60  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

e  nature  of  reality  as  a  whole,  and  provided  that  the  nature  of 
ility  be  in  harmony  with  the  permanent  interests  of  human 
lure.    That  it  is  so,  we  all  instinctively  assume,  but  we  have  no 
(olute  certainty  of  the  truth  of  this  assumption.     It  sometimes 
Jpens  that  between  two  or  more  inconsistent  hypotheses  or  be- 
liefs, the  facts  do  not  give  us  unequivocal  grounds  for  choosing. 
Two  incompatible  ideas  may  work  equally  well,  affording  equally 
good  satisfactions.     The  moral  standards  of  him  who  scorns  de- 
lights and  lives  laborious  days  from  a  sense  of  duty  and  the 
unmoral  principles  of  the  prudent  epicurean,  may  afford  equal 
amounts  of  satisfaction  to  their  respective  votaries ;  which  then  is 
true  ?    Pragmatically,  it  would  seem  that  there  can  be  no  preferen- 
tial choice  between  them. 

Meanings,  to  be  true,  must  be  in  harmony  with  the  actual  con- 
stitution of  reality.  The  primary  postulate  of  intelligent  life  is 
that  reality  is  responsive  to  the  organizing  activity  of  thought. 
Perhaps  this  postulate  gets  increasing  justification  in  the  progress 
of  knowledge  and  conduct ;  but,  since  our  interpretations  of  experi- 
ence change  and  grow,  and  our  experience  changes  and  grows  with 
the  interpretations,  it  cannot  be  maintained  that  any  analysis  and 
conceptual  interpretation  of  experience  is  complete  and  final.  On 
the  other  hand,  many  features  of  human  experience  are,  on  the 
whole,  pretty  constant.  The  elemental  qualities  of  sense  data, 
human  affection,  and  the  structure  of  thought,  are  irreducible. 
They  are,  as  Mr.  Russell  says,  "hard  data."  There  is  no  criterion 
by  which  we  can  determine  whether  we  know  reality  as  it  may 
exist  independently  of  our  sense  data,  our  affectional  reactions 
thereto,  and  our  conceptual  interpretations  thereof.  We  can  have 
no  concern  with  such  an  abstractly  conceived  world  as  reality  in 
itself.  The  structural  principles  of  thought  and  the  valuations 
which  result  from  our  affectional  reactions  to  sense  data  are  all 
interwoven  in  the  texture  of  what  is  for  us  the  only  actual  world. 
We  form  our  conceptual  pictures  of  the  world  by  the  organization 
and  interpretation  of  sense  data,  of  our  affectional  evaluations,  and 
of  the  relations  between  sense  data  and  our  affective  life ;  through 
reflective  thinking.  In  this  sense,  man,  as  a  perceiving,  feeling, 
and  above  all,  a  rational  or  thinking  being,  is  the  measure  of 
reality.    For  we  can  find  no  other. 

The  pragmatist  who  finds  the  criterion  of  reality  and  truth  in 
satisfaction,   and   the   speculative   idealist   who   argues   that   the 


THE  CRITERIA  OF  KNOWLEDGE  61 

absolute  satisfaction  is  to  be  found  in  the  ideal  of  a  strictly 
harmonious  whole  of  experience,  are  not  so  far  apart  as  at  first 
blush  they  seem  to  be.  The  greatest  difference  between  them  is 
that,  whereas  the  speculative  idealist  holds  that  his  criterion  of 
satisfaction  is  eternally  real,  and  a  terminus  a  quo,  the  pragmatist 
regards  it  as  a  goal  to  be  indefinitely  approximated  to;  that  is, 
as  a  terminus  ad  quern.  For  the  idealist  the  strictly  harmonious 
whole  is  really  here  and  now,  as  always.  Our  business  is  to  de- 
cipher it  and  live  by  the  light  of  our  discovery.  For  the  pragmatist 
this  ideal  harmony  of  experience  is  not  now  real,  and  our  business 
is  to  make  it  more  nearly  real.  For  my  own  part  I  do  not  know 
whether  reality  is  now  a  strictly  harmonious  whole.  If  it  is  not, 
we  may  be  able  to  do  something  to  make  it  a  little  more  harmoni- 
ous, but  our  first  business,  as  thinkers,  is  to  find  out  what  reality  is 
like,  and  that  is  the  whole  business  of  metaphysics.  /  shall  define 
reality  as  including  everything  which  we  must  take  account  of  in 
our  thinking  and  willing.  Alike  in  sense  perception,  in  the  in- 
tuition of  logical  relations,  and  in  the  appreciations  or  valuing 
reactions  of  human  affection,  it  is  the  unavoidableness,  the  in- 
evitableness  of  the  inferences  and  the  acts,  their  congruence  with 
one  another  and  their  repetition  or  persistence  that  constitute  their 
reality.  Sensory  data  we  cannot  abolish  or  pass  through  as  through 
a  mist.  Whatever  logical  constructions  we  may  set  up  to  account  for 
the  stubborn  persistence  of  the  data,  the  affectional  reactions  or 
evaluations  of  experience  that  human  beings  make,  such  as  desire 
and  aversion,  love  and  hate,  are  equally  stubborn  data.  The  logical 
principles,  or  fundamental  modes  of  operation  of  thought,  are  a 
third  set  of  stubborn  data.  I  shall  take  reality  then  to  include  the 
most  individual  and  private  human  feelings,  views  and  valuations, 
no  less  than  sensory  data  and  logical  principles.  I  shall  take  it  to 
include  the  relations  between  these  entities,  to  include  those 
thought-constructed  entities  which  are  logically  implicated  in  the 
structure  of  actual  experience.  Actuality  belongs  to  the  whole 
complex  of  experience,  sensory,  affectional,  reflective,  appreciative 
and  volitional.  It  includes  the  particular  data  and  their  contexture 
of  relations.  Reality  is  not  merely  either  subjective  or  objective, 
psychical  or  physical,  sensuously  particular  or  abstractly  universal. 
It  includes  and  transcends  in  its  totality  all  of  these.  It  is  the 
whole  of  actual  experience  with  its  logical  structure  and  implica- 
tions.   The  most  comprehensive  criterion  of  truth  or  knowledge  is 


62  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

this:  the  truest  propositions  are  those  worked  out  by  the  most 
thoroughgoing  analysis  of  sensory  data,  affective  attitudes  and 
conative  acts,  and  by  the  most  comprehensive  synthesis  or  organiza- 
tion of  the  results  of  analysis  under  the  guidance  of  the  intellectual 
principles  of  categorialness,  comprehensiveness  and  consistency. 
A  proposition  is  categorial  if  its  data  cannot  be  broken  up  into 
more  elementary  ones.  By  comprehensiveness  I  mean  that  truth 
requires  that  we  should  regard  the  relevancy  of  propositions  to  one 
another,  and  by  consistency  I  mean  that  true  propositions  cannot 
contradict  one  another. 

The  third  problem  involved  in  James'  statement  of  pragmatism 
is  this:  must  every  so-called  fact,  to  be  recognized  as  real  fact, 
be  experienceable,  that  is,  be  conceivable  as  under  definite  assign- 
able conditions  existing  for  some  actual  or  hypothetical  experient  ? 
An  affirmative  answer  to  this  question  means  this :  knowable  real- 
ity is  experienceable  reality,  and  unexperienceable  reality  is  as 
good  as  nonexistent.  Now  there  may  be  realities  which  are  not  and 
never  will  be  empirical  facts.  It  cannot  be  gainsaid  that  there 
may  be  existent  things  that  are  not  only  beyond  the  range  of  all 
actual  experience,  but,  as  well,  beyond  the  range  of  all  possible 
experience.  To  have  insisted  on  this  point  is  one  merit  of  neo- 
realism.  On  the  other  hand,  all  reality  that  can  be  matter  for 
intelligible  discussion  must  be  either  matter  of  actual  experience 
or  conceivable  as,  under  definite  and  assignable  conditions,  becom- 
ing matter  of  experience.  All  our  scientific  and  philosophical 
doctrines  are  subject,  of  course,  to  the  qualification  that  the  whole 
field  of  human  experience  and  its  interpretation  may  be  one  vast 
illusion,  may  be  an  original  distortion  of  a  real  existence  whose 
character  is  in  some  wholly  inscrutable  fashion  different  from  our 
world.  But  this  abstract  possibility  need  not  disturb  us.  Motley 
is  the  garb  we  wear,  and  it  would  be  folly  to  discard  or  neglect  to 
repair  our  own  livery  because,  perchance,  we  may  cut  a  sorry  figure 
in  the  eyes  of  some  unknowable  cosmic  joker.  In  science  and  in 
philosophy,  as  in  practical  life,  we  are  limited  to  the  world  of 
human  experience  and  its  organization  and  conceptual  extension  in 
the  pursuit  of  our  affectional  and  logical  aims.  Anything  beyond 
the  human  world,  by  which  we  might  reinterpret  or  reconstruct  its 
character,  could  affect  our  world  only  by  becoming  an  integral  part 
thereof.  Any  absolute,  into  which  our  human  world  is  absorbed 
or  transmuted,  no  one  knows  how  or  to  what  extent,  is  both  prac- 


THE  CRITERIA  OF  KNOWLEDGE  63 

tically  useless  and  logically  worthless.  In  this  sense  all  philosophy 
must  necessarily  be  humanistic. 

Truth  is  the  reflective  apprehension  and  the  expression  in  sym- 
bols of  the  relations,  in  other  words  of  the  theoretical  meanings  and 
the  practical  values,  that  constitute  the  texture  of  experience. 
Even  the  most  abstract  and  symbolic  principles  of  pure  logic  and 
mathematics  derive  from  and  refer  back  to  the  texture  of  experi- 
ence. In  the  various  partial  systems,  which  constitute  the  bodies 
of  special  sciences  and  particular  knowledges,  emphasis  may  fall 
principally  on  the  universal  relationships  as  in  pure  logic  and 
mathematics;  or  it  may  fall  chiefly  on  the  significant  qualitative 
values  and  special  relationships  of  individual  beings  and  events,  as 
in  history,  biography,  art,  belles  lettres.  There  are,  in  the  total 
field  of  knowledge  and  conduct,  many  grades  of  varying  emphasis 
on  unique  fact  and  universal;  but,  wherever  reality  has  meaning 
and  can  thus  be  subject  matter  of  knowledge  or  intelligent  practice, 
both  must  be  present  and  interwoven  in  some  degree.  Philosophy's 
task  is  to  correct  a  one-sided  emphasis  on  special  types  of  fact  and 
special  types  of  relational  connections  or  universals,  to  see  that 
justice  is  done  to  the  integral  nature  of  truth  and  life.  Philos- 
ophy's fruit  resides  in  no  mystical  intuition  of  a  transcendental 
order,  but  in  that  settled  determination  to  see  life  steadily  and  to 
see  it  whole,  which  alone  will  deliver  men  from  intellectual  provin- 
cialism and  practical  parochialism. 

Every  specific  judgment  in  regard  to  existence  depends  for  its 
truth  on  its  consistency  with  actual  experience  and  its  consistency 
with  further  experiences.  If  a  judgment  clash  with  a  concrete 
experience,  the  meaning  of  its  experiental  context  has  been  mis- 
conceived. On  the  other  hand  there  are  various  sorts  of  dishar- 
monies in  actual  experience.  Hence  a  judgment  or  inference 
which  expresses  a  disharmony  in  experience  may  be  true,  and  a 
judgment  which  expresses  a  harmony  may  be  false  because  incon- 
sistent with  fact.  The  ultimate  ideal  of  truth,  as  the  significant 
and  coherent  awareness  of  reality,  must  not  be  taken  to  mean  that 
reality  contains  no  conflicts,  no  unreconciled  oppositions.  It  does 
not  take  a  professional  philosopher  to  see  that  conflict  and  opposition 
are  cardinal  features  in  the  individual  life  as  well  as  of  the  social 
and  cosmic  orders.  Indeed,  the  philosopher  must  beware  lest,  in 
his  persistent  quest  for  the  intellectual  vision  of  a  cosmic  order,  he 
read   his   own  passionate   desire  for  harmony   and  totality  over 


64  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

hastily  into  the  tangled  facts  of  experience.  To  do  this  is  to  com- 
mit what  is  the  philosopher's  fallacy  par  excellence.  The  agree- 
ment of  thought  with  reality  does  not  mean  that  truth  is  the  reflec- 
tion of  a  completely  harmonious  experience  or  perfect  world  order. 
Harmony  or  self-consistency  in  thought  and  feeling  is  the  ideal 
standard  of  our  intellectual  quest,  as  of  our  practical  conations,  our 
aesthetic  visions  and  our  religious  aspirations.  But  such  harmony 
is  never  our  actual  and  complete  possession.  Truth,  as  a  human 
achievement,  is  the  progressing  reflective  awareness  of  the  sys- 
tematic interrelations  of  all  the  qualitative  elements  of  reality. 
But  actual  reality  ever  remains,  for  us  men,  full  of  problems  and 
disharmonies.  If  reality  be  ultimately  a  coherent  whole,  its  con- 
flicts and  discords  will  somehow  enter  into  it  as  constituent  ele- 
ments. The  philosopher  has  a  twofold  problem  on  his  hands — 
what  are  the  ultimate  qualitative  constituents  of  reality  and  what 
are  their  interrelations  ? 

Actual  reality  is  the  whole  content  of  experience.  Of  this  the 
interpretative  activity  of  thought  is  an  inexpugnable  part.  Since 
actual  reality  is  never  a  completely  given  and  harmonious  whole 
of  fact,  it  is  always  in  part  an  intellectual  problem.  A  fact  may 
be  a  partial  answer  to  a  specific  problem,  but  it  always  starts  up 
another  problem.  The  fact  is  always  a  fragmentary  experience 
enmeshed  in  a  context  of  relations.  The  correspondence  test  of 
truth  applies  most  obviously  to  the  agreement  of  judgment  and 
beliefs  with  immediate  experience.  A  proposition  that  points  to 
an  immediate  experience  is  proved  by  comparison  with  the  kind 
of  experience  it  points  to.  The  lack  of  agreement  between  a 
proposition  and  a  concrete  experience  requires  either  the  revision 
or  the  rejection  of  the  proposition.  On  the  other  hand  an  imme- 
diate experience  points  beyond  itself  just  as  truly  as  a  proposition 
about  immediate  experience.  Our  judgments  and  beliefs,  on  the 
one  hand,  and  our  immediate  experiences,  on  the  other  hand,  must 
harmonize,  and  we  can  draw  no  hard  and  fast  line  between  imme- 
diate experiences  and  their  meanings.  Moreover,  there  are  many 
propositions  claiming  to  be  true  which  lie  beyond  the  range  of  com- 
plete verification  in  immediate  experience.  Such  are  all  universal 
relations  in  pure  logic  and  mathematics,  many  new  generalizations 
in  physical  science,  alleged  facts  of  history,  and  ethical  and 
religious  valuations.  Into  these  fields  we  are  led,  and  through 
them  we  are  guided,  by  the  ideal  of  a  harmonious  whole  of  truth 


THE  CRITERIA  OF  KNOWLEDGE  65 

and  life.  Thus,  the  never  completely  realized  ideal  of  the  har- 
monious whole  is  the  very  nerve  of  truth  seeking  and  all  practical 
endeavor.  Thus  the  specific  and  concrete  agreements  of  judgments 
and  beliefs  with  fact  are  stages  in  the  realization  of  the  ideal  of 
significant  harmony  as  the  ultimate  goal  of  thought  and  life. 
Guided  by  this  ideal  we  may  rationally  believe  in  the  reality  of 
entities  that  we  never  expect  to  experience  directly,  because  this 
belief  is  logically  implied  both  in  the  theoretical  and  practical 
continuity  of  experience.  For  example,  I  have  never  directly  ex- 
perienced the  immediate  reality  of  other  personal  centers  of  affect- 
ive experience ;  but,  logically,  affectively,  and  ethically,  my  world 
would  be  a  bedlam  without  this  belief.  For  similar  reasons,  I 
believe  in  the  physical  constituents  of  the  stars  and  in  the  dynamic 
or  spatial  or  temporal  continuity  of  the  physical  universe.  Per- 
sonally I  find  myself  constrained,  for  similar  reasons,  to  believe  in 
the  continuity  of  life.  Why  ?  Because  without  such  beliefs  actual 
experience  would  be  incoherent.  Thus  sensory  and  affectional 
experiences  are  never  self-complete.  They  never  stand  wholly  on 
their  own  feet.  If  they  could  there  would  be  no  need  of  scientific 
theories  nor  of  ethical,  philosophical  or  religious  doctrines.  More- 
over the  nonexperienced  entities  in  which  we  believe  also  include 
entities  that  we  may  never  expect  to  see  face  to  face.  My  belief  in 
a  rational  and  righteous  world  order  may  be  valid,  though  I  may 
never  expect  to  see  face  to  face  the  sustainer  of  this  world  order. 
We  believe  in  these  nonexperienced  entities,  because  such  belief 
is  the  ultimate  consequence  of  the  fundamental  working  assump- 
tion of  science  and  conduct;  that  reality  is  a  coherent  whole  in 
which  the  meanings  of  our  actual  experience  are  constituent  fac- 
tors, although  we  may  not  be  able  to  see  how  the  latter  enter  as 
integral  elements  into  an  intuition  of  the  whole.  This  working 
assumption  is  what  is  meant  by  the  hypothesis  of  the  rationality  of 
the  universe.  The  inconsistencies  in  actual  experience,  and  in  its 
interpretations,  impel  thought  to  the  reconstruction  of  experience 
and  its  interpretations.  By  this  continuous  reconstruction  we 
make  our  knowledge  and  our  conduct  more  harmonious  with  reality 
— that  is,  we  make  the  bits  of  reality  which  we  are  more  har- 
monious with  the  universe.  The  adequate  interpretation  of  actual 
experience  requires  that  it  be  enlarged  and  completed  by  belief  in 
a  conceptual  reality  of  which  the  empirical  reality  is  but  a  partial 
aspect.     The  fuller  and  more  harmonious  conceptual  reality  is  a 


66  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

realm  of  concrete  possibilities,  since  some  of  the  conditions  of  its 
being  are  actually  present  in  empirical  reality  and  in  the  logical, 
ethical  and  aesthetic  demands  of  selves.  For  example,  that  one 
shall  make  a  valuable  discovery  in  science,  aid  materially  in  the 
work  of  social  reconstruction,  realize  a  moral  ideal,  or  write  a  great 
drama  or  novel — all  these  are  concrete  or  real  possibilities,  since 
some  of  the  conditions  of  their  fulfillment  are  actual  in  the  em- 
pirical world  of  nature  and  humanity.  Promises  and  potencies  of 
future  fulfillment  of  purposes  and  values  must  be  as  real  as 
empirical  fact.  The  imiverse  is  a  storehouse  of  determinate  possi- 
bilities for  human  thinkers  and  doers. 

The  validity  of  knowledge  presupposes  (1)  that  the  mind  has, 
at  some  points  at  least,  immediate  acquaintance  with  reality ;  and 
(2)  that  those  parts  of  reality  which  do  not  consist  of  the  individual 
mind's  acts  of  knowing  exist  independently  of  the  individual 
mind.  One  must  reject  the  argument  that,  since  an  immediate 
acquaintance  with  actuality  is  matter  for  or  before  conscious 
experience,  therefore  one  cannot  know  anything  that  does  not 
exist  in  some  consciousness.  This  argument  interchanges  for 
"before  or  present  to"  and  "in"  in  the  sense  of  "dependent  on." 
While,  on  the  one  hand,  the  character  of  the  sensory  system  of  the 
experient  and  the  structure  of  his  thought  is  implicated  in  the 
character  of  the  objects  experienced  and  related,  on  the  other  hand 
it  is  an  assumption  wholly  without  warrant  to  say  that  the  natures 
of  the  objects  experienced  must  be  constituted  or  even  distorted 
by  being  experienced  and  thought.  The  human  consciousness  may 
be,  to  some  extent,  pellucid.  If  thinking  cannot  grasp  relations 
objective  to  the  thinker  the  case  is  hopeless  for  any  knowledge. 

To  sum  up:  The  pragmatist  rightly  insists  that  ideas,  to  be 
true,  must  somewhere  and  sometime  correspond  with  facts ;  must, 
in  short,  find  factual  fulfillment.  He  is  wrong  when  he  argues  that 
those  ideas,  and  those  alone,  which  seem  to  satisfy  the  immediate 
practical  and  emotional  interests  of  individuals  or  social  groups 
are  therefore  true ;  he  is  overlooking  the  stubborn  and  determinate 
character  both  of  the  order  of  brute  physical  fact  and  of  the  order 
of  psychical  and  logical  fact.  The  absolute  idealist  is  right  in 
insisting  that  the  very  structure  of  reason  or  thought  is  such  that 
contradictory  propositions  cannot  be  accepted  by  it  and  that  it  is 
of  the  very  essence  of  mind,  in  all  its  phases,  to  seek  harmony  or 
consistency  in  experience  and  its  interpretations.    He  is  wrong  in 


THE  CRITERIA  OF  KNOWLEDGE  67 

so  far  as  he  assumes  that  an  eternal  or  supertemporal  harmony  is 
the  only  true  reality ;  thus  discounting  the  meaning  of  the  actual 
discords  and  conflicts  in  human  experience  with  the  glib  and  use- 
less formula  that  these  discords  are  all  transmuted  and  absorbed 
in  the  beautiful  bliss  of  the  eternal  harmony — the  formula  is 
useless  until  we  are  told  just  how  the  transmutation  is  to  be 
wrought. 

Truth  is  the  most  adequate  and  consistent  agreement  of  the 
meanings,  distilled  by  reflexion  from  experimental  fact,  with  fact 
and  with  one  another. 


CHAPTER  V 


KNOWLEDGE  AND  EEALITY  * 


What  is  the  relation  of  cognition  to  its  objects  ?  There  are  two 
extreme  answers  to  this  question — epistemological  monism,  and 
epistemological  dualism.  The  monist  holds  that,  in  every  case  of 
genuine  knowing,  the  state  or  act  of  knowing  is  identical  with  its 
objects.  In  so  far  as  I  am  a  knower  I  am  identical  with  what  I 
know.  In  perceiving  a  physical  object  the  thing  perceived  is 
identical  with  the  state  of  perception.  In  Berkeley's  words,  esse 
est  percipi.  Similarly,  in  imagining  or  conceiving  anything  the 
mental  process  must  be  existentially  identical  with  what  is  con- 
ceived or  imagined.  It  follows  that  all  reality  is  matter  of  experi- 
ence, content  of  an  experient's  mind.  The  doctrine  is  identified 
with  naive  realism,  the  belief  that  we  always  know  things  exactly 
as  they  are.  If  this  means  the  naivete  of  the  man  in  the  street,  I 
must  demur.  So  far  as  I  know  him,  he  is  not  quite  so  unsophis- 
ticated. 

Let  it  be  denied  that  the  experient  experiences  himself.  Then 
from  the  premises  of  epistemological  monism,  since  all  reality 
is  experience,  the  experient  is  nonexistent,  and  experience  is  a 
fatherless  and  motherless  waif;  it  turns  into  a  neutral  world  of 
pure  experience  (a,  la  James)  ;  then  since  experience  without  an 
experient  is  a  bit  thick  it  is  changed,  by  the  new  realists,  into  a 
world  of  neutral  entities  which  are  neither  fish,  flesh  nor  fowl.  The 
good  Bishop  of  Cloyne  would  turn  in  his  grave  at  the  sight  of  his 
progeny.  But  the  neutral  entities  are  logically  descended  from 
Berkeley.  Begin  by  denying  the  duality  of  cognition  and  its 
objects,  and  the  validity  of  constructing  a  concept  of  material  sub- 
stance since  it  is  not  actually  experienced,  and  logically  the  self 


1  This  and  the  following  chapters  are  in  part  the  revised  form  of  a  discus- 
sion first  printed,  under  the  title  "Perception  and  Physical  Keality,"  in  The 
Philosophical  Eeview,  Vol.  xix,  No.  i,  January,  1910,  pp.  1-21. 

68 


KNOWLEDGE  AND   REALITY  69 

goes  the  same  way,  as  Hume  the  enfant  terrible  of  British  men- 
talism  showed ;  then  experience  or  reality  ceases  to  be  experience ; 
it  cannot  be  matter  and  there  is  no  mind ;  there  is  nothing  left  for 
it  but  neutrality.2 

Let  us  take  monism  as  a  hypothesis  and  work  it.  If  the  mind 
is  wholly  identical  with  the  objects  of  its  knowing  then  Berkeley- 
anism  or  "mentalism"  follows  as  the  night  from  day.  Whatsoever 
exists  can  exist  only  as  the  content  of  some  conscious  subject  or 
experient.  If  I  must  believe  that  a  part  of  my  experience-content 
exists  when  I  am  not  experiencing  it,  then  it  must  exist  in  and  for 
some  other  mind.  But,  if  all  that  I  know  be  what  I  experience, 
how  do  I  know  that  any  other  mind  exists  ?  I  do  not  experience 
immediately  any  other  self,  and  if  I  did  he  would  be  but  my  idea, 
which  might  not  be  very  satisfactory  to  him.  Berkeley  argues  that 
I  know  that  I  do  not  cause  my  own  ideas  or  objects  of  knowledge 
to  exist,  since  they  come  and  go,  at  least  to  a  large  extent,  inde- 
pendently of  my  will;  therefore,  they  must  have  an  originating 
and  sustaining  cause  independent  of  me.  Now,  I  am  immediately 
aware  of  myself  as  a  cause ;  therefore  the  independent  cause  of  my 
experience  must  be  another  will  or  self.  Certainly  I  would  never 
be  conscious  of  myself  as  willing  or  as  a  cause  unless  there  were 
obstacles  to  my  desires  and  purposes.  Therefore  my  consciousness 
of  willing  presupposes  the  existence  of  something  real  independent 
of  my  will ;  but  this  something  is  not,  of  necessity,  another  will. 
For  instance,  I  do  not  have  to  assume  that  the  inertia  of  the  table 
is  a  case  of  countervolition.  The  table  does  not,  in  the  least, 
behave  like  a  self.  Moreover,  I  become  conscious  of  myself  as 
will,  only  in  conflict  and  cooperation  with  centers  of  resist- 
ance and  cooperation,  which  I  recognize  as  being  other  than 
myself  and,  because  of  differences  in  behavior  between  these 
other  centers  of  resistance  (some  of  them  can  be  persuaded, 
intimidated  or  enticed  into  acting  with  and  for  me),  I  am  led  to 
make  a  distinction  between  nonvolitional  or  physical  centers  of 
inertia  and  action  and  other  volitional  centers.  In  fact  it  is  not 
possible  to  account  for  my  coming  to  full  self-consciousness  at  all, 


8  The  supposed  duality  between  knowledge  and  its  objects  has  been  con- 
fused with,  and  indeed  based  on,  the  metaphysical  two-substance  dualism  of 
mind  and  body.  The  two  problems  are  quite  distinct,  though  related;  we  shall 
not  get  forward  unless  we  keep  them  distinct.  Our  present  concern  is  with  the 
duality  of  subject  and  object  in  cognition. 


70  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

except  in  social  relations  with  other  centers  of  consciousness. 
Thus,  Berkeley's  argument  falls  to  the  ground,  unless  it  be  first 
assumed  that  other  finite  centers  of  volition  exist.  He  assumes, 
without  proof,  the  existence  of  human  society.  He  is  a  social  and 
psychical  realist  and  pluralist. 

Now,  given  a  society  of  selves  (two  will  be  enough),  the 
cognitively  primary  objective  or  real  world  is  that  which  appears 
to  exist  in  common  for  these  selves.  If  a  physical  object  is  real  for 
me  I  must  believe  that  any  normal  self  would  perceive  its  existence, 
if  placed  under  the  same  conditions  as  I  am  under.  The  percep- 
tions of  an  abnormal  self,  that  is,  one  out  of  key  with  the  social 
normality,  would  be  explained  in  terms  of  his  deviation  from  the 
normal  or  social  standard.  To  say  that  a  judgment  or  a  series  of 
judgments  is  true,  that  a  concept  or  law  is  valid,  is  to  say,  in  effect, 
that  other  selves,  with  the  same  sensory  and  intellectual  make-up, 
would  recognize  it  to  be  true  under  the  same  conditions.  The 
cognized  existence  of  a  common  or  real  physical  world  presupposes 
an  identity  of  function,  and  hence,  of  structure,  in  different  selves. 
On  the  other  hand,  if  two  selves  do  not  perceive  quite  the  same 
thing  (in  the  case,  say,  of  color  or  tone  discriminations)  they  can 
discover  and  recognize  the  reasons  why  they  do  not  perceive  quite 
the  same  thing.  But  the  possibility  of  this  recognition  presupposes 
an  identity  of  perceptual  and  intellectual  function  in  different 
selves. 

Thus,  it  is  impossible  to  account  for  knowledge  without  pre- 
supposing the  existence  of  at  least  one  other  self  than  the  knower. 
The  admission  of  physical  objectivity  presupposes  the  admission 
of  the  reality  of  society.  The  cognized  objective  order  is  a  function 
of  the  social  order.  And,  if  one  refuses  to  make  the  admission  and 
accepts  the  logical  consequence,  solipsistic  subjectivism,  namely — 
that  he  knows  only  that  he  himself  exists  as  a  conscious  being,  the 
reply  is  that,  when  he  says  this  he  announces  that  there  are  other 
conscious  beings.  If  I  say  that  "I"  am  the  only  self  that  I  am 
sure  really  exists,  the  sentence  has  meaning  only  because  I  sur- 
reptitiously assume  the  existence  of  other  "I"  's.  For  genetic 
psychology  clearly  shows  that  the  consciousness  of  the  "I"  is  con- 
ditioned by  the  consciousness  of  other  "I"  's.  What  sense  is  there 
in  affirming  my  own  existence,  if  there  be  no  one  else  to  recognize 
my  existence  or  to  challenge  my  affirmation  ?  The  solipsist  forgets 
that  his  own  consciousness  is  relative  to,  and  implies  the  recog- 


KNOWLEDGE  AND   REALITY  71 

nition  of,  and  by,  other  selves.  The  existence  of  community  and 
the  power  of  communication  are  the  presuppositions  of  all  human 
agreements  and  disagreements  in  regard  to  an  objective  or  real 
world. 

Furthermore,  a  considerable  part  of  our  knowledge  is  repre- 
sentative or  symbolical.  When  I  say,  "I  know  the  content  of  a 
certain  book,"  or  "I  know  a  certain  place  other  than  where  I  am," 
or  "I  know  the  Darwinian  theory  or  the  theory  of  gravitation," 
I  mean  that  I  have  "ideas"  or  trains  of  sentences,  pictorial  images 
and  scientific  symbols,  which  I  believe  to  represent  the  realities  in 
question.  I  do  not  mean  that  /  as  knower  am  the  book  or  the 
place  or  the  theory  in  question.  Knowing  always  involves  a  duality 
— a  relation  between  images,  words  or  symbols  with  meanings  for 
some  knower  and  the  objects  which  these  images  or  symbols  mean. 
To  mean,  may  be  to  picture,  point  to,  or  express  by  a  symbol,  a 
quality  or  relation  of  the  thing  meant,  such  as  a  color,  a  mode  of 
behavior,  an  ethical  value.  Thus  far,  the  position  of  epistemo- 
logical  dualism  is  correct.  The  being  of  knowing  is  not  identical 
with  the  being  of  the  objects  of  knowledge.  The  cognitive  differ- 
ence between  sensation  and  perception,  for  instance,  is  that  sensa- 
tion consists  in  a  sensory  process  whose  setting  and  relations  are 
not  clearly  cognized,  whereas  a  perception  is  a  clear  cognition ;  the 
difference  between  a  dumb  feeling  and  an  awareness  is  that  in 
dumb  feeling  we  are  not  aware  that  we  feel. 

Naive  realism  tries  to  get  around  the  duality  of  knowing  and 
its  objects  by  the  doctrine  that  knowing  consists  in  the  knower's 
ideas  copying  or  representing  the  objects  known.  In  perception 
the  knower  is  not  aware  of  having  copies  of  things  in  his  mind. 
Perception  is  an  attitude  in  which  the  percipient  is  immediately 
aware  of  the  object  perceived.  But  there  are  memory-images  and 
symbols  (words  and  pictures)  to  represent  objects  not  present  to 
sense.  And  there  are  other  knowers,  whose  acts  and  words  do  not 
indicate  that  they  perceive  things  in  quite  the  same  way  that  I  do. 
There  is  color  blindness ;  there  are  variations  in  the  perceptions  of 
sizes,  shapes,  odors,  tastes ;  there  are,  in  short,  many  sorts  of  dif- 
ferences between  the  percepts  of  different  percipients;  and  even 
the  same  percipient  varies  from  time  to  time  in  his  perception 
of  the  supposedly  same  object.  If  one  must  assume  that  the  things 
perceived  are  identical  with  the  perception  of  them,  it  would  fol- 
low that  there  are  as  many  distinct  things  as  there  are  distinct 


72  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

percepts.3  Suppose  all  the  people  on  this  half  of  the  earth  to 
be  perceiving  a  sun  simultaneously ;  then  there  would  be,  perhaps, 
800,000,000  suns ;  suppose  they  all  shut  their  eyes  for  five  minutes, 
then  all  these  suns  would  vanish  and  800,000,000  new  suns 
would  spring  into  existence  when  they  opened  their  eyes  again. 
But  there  does  seem  to  be  some  degree  of  constancy  and  order 
about  the  qualities  and  appearances  of  the  sun.  The  simplest 
hypothesis  is  that  there  is  one  sun,  which  is  perceived  by  everybody 
and  that  everybody  perceives  it  according  to  his  sensory  and  mental 
equipment  and  history  and  position.  Such  is  the  view  of  common 
sense.  It  escapes  one  difficulty  to  fall  into  another.  If  all  our 
perceptions  are  copies  of  objects,  how  can  we  know  how  good  copies 
they  are,  or  that  they  do  not  wholly  misrepresent  the  originals, 
unless  we  can  perceive  the  originals  ?  And  how  can  we  perceive  the 
originals,  unless  our  percepts  are  at  least  parts  or  aspects  of  the 
originals. 

There  is  a  duality  in  knowing  that  cannot  be  overcome,  but, 
if  it  be  a  dualism,  then  all  knowing,  so-called,  is  reduced  to  the 
status  of  subjective  states.  It  all  may  be,  as  Locke  put  it,  "bare 
vision." 

But,  if  we  admit  an  inherent  duality  in  the  knowing  process, 
are  we  not  committed  to  phenomenalism,  all  along  the  line — to  the 
view  that  we  know,  not  reality  or  things  in  themselves,  but  only 
their  phenomena  or  appearances?  Does  not  the  admission  that 
ideas  are  representatives  or  symbols  of  realities  other  than  them- 
selves commit  one  to  the  further  admission  that  one  cannot  say 
just  what  ideas  represent  and  how  far  and  how  well  they  are 
representative?  Would  it  not  follow  that  the  only  way  to  know 
reality  would  be  to  transcend  reflective  knowledge  in  an  immediate 
experience,  in  which  the  distinction  of  subject  and  object  in  know- 
ing would  be  dissolved  in  an  immediacy,  like  unto,  but  higher  than, 
the  immediacy  of  mere  sensation  or  feeling  ?  Such  is  the  conclu- 
sion that  philosophers  traveling  over  such  diverse  roads  as  Plotinus, 
Fichte,  Schelling,  F.  H.  Bradley,  William  James  and  Henri 
Bergson  seem  to  reach. 

Once  the  epistemological  monism  of  the  naive  realist  is  aban- 
doned, philosophy  seems  committed  to  a  phenomenalistic  view  of 
knowledge,  from  which  there  is  no  escape  except  by  way  of  the 

•Hume  saw  this.    Cf.  Treatise,  Book  i,  Part  iv,  Sect.  2. 


KNOWLEDGE  AND   REALITY  73 

transcendence  of  the  knowledge  relation  in  some  ineffable  and 
incommunicable  experience  or  mystic  intuition.  How  can  know- 
ing transcend  itself  and  remain  knowing?  Must  it  not  die  to 
live  again  in  some  sort  of  immediate  experience,  an  aboriginal  flow 
of  feeling  or  self-transcending  intuition,  if  the  self  is  to  reach 
reality  ? 

There  are  various  forms  and  shades  of  phenomenalism.  The 
one  principle  which  they  have  in  common  is  that  it  is  not  possible 
for  the  human  mind,  by  reflective  knowing,  to  transcend  itself,  to 
break  out  of  the  charmed  circle  of  its  own  processes  and  to  lay 
hold  on  the  real  stuff  of  reality.  The  chief  varieties  of  phenomen- 
alism are:  (1)  The  sensationalistic  or  impressionistic  phenomen- 
alism of  Hume,  J.  S.  Mill,  T.  H.  Huxley,  Ernst  Mach,  Karl 
Pearson,  and  many  scientists.4  (2)  The  rationalistic  phenomen- 
alism of  Kant  and  his  orthodox  followers.  (3)  Related  to  the 
latter  doctrine  are  the  immediatist  doctrine  of  Mr.  F.  H.  Bradley, 
the  immediatism  of  William  James  and  the  intuitionism  of  M. 
Bergson ;  these  thinkers,  reaching  by  different  routes  the  conclusion 
that  conceptualizing  or  reflective  thinking  does  not  acquaint  us 
with  the  nature  of  reality,  find  reality  in  an  immediate  experience, 
feeling,  or  intuition. 

1.  Hume's  >doctrine  that  we  know  only  our  own  impressions  and 
the  traces  left  by  them,  together  with  the  associational  linkages 
formed  among  them,  by  force  of  contiguity,  repetition  and  resem- 
blance, logically  leads  to  agnostic  phenomenalism  and  solipsism. 
We  may  believe  in  an  external  world  and  other  selves,  but  we  have 
no  rational  grounds  for  such  beliefs.  Their  basis  is  instinct  and 
custom.  Hume  was  consistent  in  holding  that  we  do  not  know 
whether  there  is  any  objective  reality,  much  less  what  it  is  like.5 
He  fails,  however,  to  account  for  the  belief  in  it,  as  well  as  for  the 
fact  that  our  ideas  and  calculations  are,  to  a  large  extent,  verified 
by  the  course  of  experience.  In  fact,  like  all  thoroughpaced 
skepticism,  Hume's  doctrine  not  only  does  not  account  for  the  suc- 


4  The  ' '  Transfigured  Realism ' '  of  Herbert  Spencer  is  a  restatement  of  the 
negative  or  phenomenalistic  arguments  of  Kant ;  but  Spencer  breaks  through 
the  circle  of  subjectivism  with  the  argument  that  our  immediate  consciousness 
of  force,  revealed  in  the  sense  of  effort,  entitles  us  to  conclude  to  the  absolute 
reality  of  force  or  energy;  the  ultimate  and  basic  reality  is  an  infinite  and 
eternal  energy  from  which  all  things  proceed. 

B  Hume,  Treatise,  Book  i,  especially  Part  iv.  Hume,  of  course,  was  clear- 
sighted enough  to  see  the  logical  consequence  of  his  own  skepticism. 


74  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

cessful  practical  working  of  our  postulates  or  beliefs  about  reality ; 
but,  moreover,  it  does  not  account  for  the  necessity  that  the  skeptic 
is  under,  like  other  men,  of  making  such  postulations.  Why  should 
a  solipsistic  skeptic  ever  take  the  trouble  to  state  even  his  negative 
theory  of  knowledge  if  he  is  in  doubt  whether  there  is  any  one  to 
hear  him  or  read  him,  and  especially  since  he  himself  only  exists 
as  a  passing  thought  ? 

The  analysis  of  perception  by  psychology,  physiology  and 
physics  seems  to  give  foundation  for  a  scientific  phenomenalism 
such  as  one  finds  in  Karl  Pearson.  Perception  and  conception,  it 
is  said,  deal  only  with  appearances,  not  with  things  in  themselves, 
since  scientific  analysis  shows  that  what  we  actually  sense  are 
patches  of  color  and  shape,  sensations  of  movement,  solidity,  rough- 
ness and  smoothness,  odors,  tastes,  heat  and  cold.  These  sense 
data  we  group  into  things,  we  know  not  why.  These  sense  data  are 
produced,  or  at  least  conditioned,  by  nerve  processes  and  other 
processes  in  the  sense  organs,  nerve  fibers  and  the  cortical  areas  of 
the  cerebrum.  The  nerve  processes  in  turn  are  determined  by 
motions  in  external  media  (undulatory  vibrations  of  the  electro- 
magnetic ether,  of  air  particles,  etc.)  that  have  no  resemblance  to 
the  sense  data.  It  would  follow  that  when  I  perceive  all  I  really 
know  is  that  I,  as  this  present  feeling,  am  having  sensations,  or  that 
the  present  feeling  feels  itself.  The  ego  is  like  a  telephone  girl 
sitting  at  the  exchange  and  talking  and  switching,  but  never  having 
seen  wires,  instruments  or  persons  outside;  or  like  a  bank  teller 
receiving  and  handling  currency,  but  never  knowing  what  it  stands 
for  in  the  commercial  world.  Thus  we  are  led  to  a  new  form  of 
solipsism.6  If  the  girl  or  the  teller  know  nothing  about  the  tele- 
phone system  or  the  currency  system,  then  I  fail  to  see  what 
meaning  they  would  find  in  doing  their  work.  The  girl  would 
not  know  that  she  was  a  switch  girl  if  she  did  not  know  what 
switches  were  for,  and  this  she  could  not  know  without  knowing 
about  real  selves  at  the  other  end  of  real  wires. 

In  order  to  distinguish  a  patch  of  color  or  a  feeling  of  hardness 
from  a  nerve  process,  and  both  from  an  undulatory  vibration  or  a 
dance  of  electrons,  it  is  necessary  that  we  should  know  what  nerve 
processes  and  motions  in  the  ether  mean,  that  is,  what  they  stand 


•K.  Pearson,  Grammar  of  Science,  3d  edition,  Chap.  2,  "The  Facts  of 
Science. ' ' 


KNOWLEDGE  AND   REALITY  75 

for  experientially.  A  nerve  process  is  either  an  observable  fact, 
hence  socially  accessible,  or  it  is  a  conceptnal  construct  which  has  a 
social  meaning  and  function.  x\n  undulation  in  the  ether,  or  a 
dance  of  electrons,  is  in  the  same  case.  In  so  far  as  the  physio- 
logical conditions  of  sense  perception  are  observable,  that  means 
that  they  are  verifiable  social  realities  which  are  conditions  of  indi- 
vidual experiences.  Since  nerve  currents,  undulations  of  the  ether 
and  movements  of  electrons  are  not  observable  facts  they  are  con- 
ceptual constructs  which  have  a  social  function. 

It  is  a  fallacy  to  say  that  because,  forsooth,  some  kind  of 
physical  motion  may  be  a  sine  qua  non  of  nerve  processes,  and 
nerve  processes  a  sine  qua  non  of  perceptions,  therefore  perceptions 
are  mere  phenomena  and  the  nerve  processes  or  the  physical 
motions  are  the  real  realities.  Thinkers  and  experients  are  just 
as  real  as  any  other  factors  in  this  world.  That  physical  motions 
are  causal  conditions  of  perception  is  true,  that  nerve  processes  are 
necessary  links  in  the  causal  chain  is  true  too ;  but  it  is  equally  true 
that  a  percipient  organism  is  the  centrally  necessary  condition  of 
there  being  a  perceived  object,  and  that  several  like-minded  and 
like-organed  percipients  are  indispensable  conditions  for  the  recog- 
nizable existence  of  a  perceived  objective  world.  The  primary 
solid  and  enduring  world  is,  not  the  realm  of  motions,  of  colorless, 
soundless  and  odorless  mass  particles  in  the  void,  but  the  world  of 
actual  and  possible  social  or  standardized  experience,  and  inter- 
pretation thereof. 

It  is  not  even  the  case  that,  when  I  perceive,  I  see  only  a  patch 
of  color  in  my  private  space  7  and  that  I  suppose  my  percept  to  be 
private.  I  never  could  distinguish  my  perception  from  yours, 
and  suppose  anything  private  about  mine,  if  I  did  not  first  believe 
that  your  experience  and  mine  were  of  a  common  object  existing 
in  a  world  of  public  space.  The  recognition  of  a  public  realm  of 
objects  of  experience  is,  both  psychologically  and  logically,  the 
condition  prerequisite  to  the  recognition  of  individual  variations  in 
the  perception  of  parts  of  this  world.  Variations  in  perception, 
even  illusions  and  hallucinations,  refer  to  the  common  objective 
order  of  the  space-time  world.  This  objective  order  has  a  com- 
munal existence ;  it  is  the  matrix  of  a  world  of  selves. 


TAs  Mr.  B.  Russell  supposes,  cf.  Our  Knowledge  of  the  External  World, 
Lectures  iii  and  iv. 


I 


76  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

2.  Kantian  phenomenalism  differs  from  sensationalistic  phe- 
nomenalism in  holding  that  the  world  of  human  experience 
is  not  the  world  of  things  in  themselves;  not  merely  be- 
cause the  nature  of  things  is  discolored  or  transformed  by- 
passing through  the  disturbing  media  of  human  sense  organs; 
but,  more  especially,  because  the  mind  must  first  organize 
the  chaotic  sense  material  into  the  world  of  knowledge  by 
the  application  of  forms  of  synthetic  thinking — space,  time  and 
the  categories,  such  as  causality  and  substantiality — before  there 
can  be  any  recognition  of  an  objective  world.  These  forms  of 
synthesis  transform  the  chaotic  manifold  of  the  senses  into  things, 
thus  introducing  into  the  sense-material  various  relations  of  order, 
such  as  unity,  causal  sequence  and  interrelation,  substantiality. 
Kant,  like  most  other  philosophers,  assumes  that  he  knows  that 
there  are  other  selves  and  never  explains  or  justifies  that  knowl- 
edge. In  short,  he  assumes  human  society  without  further  ado, 
and  makes  the  empirically  or  phenomenally  real  external  world 
the  world  which  exists  in  common  for  like-minded  percipients  and 
thinkers. 

Now,  besides  the  latter  assumption  which  in  some  form  is  in- 
evitable, Kant  makes  two  gratuitous  assumptions.  These  are:  (1) 
that  sensation,  the  raw  material  of  our  known  world  of  phenomena, 
is  a  chaotic  manifold;  (2)  that  the  forms  of  mental  synthesis, 
which  bring  order  into  the  chaos,  and  thus  build  up  a  physical 
world,  do  not  correspond  with  the  structural  character  of  reality-in- 
itself.  The  second  assumption  is  an  inevitable  consequence  of  the 
first  and  vice  versa.  There  seem  to  have  been  two  motives  in 
Kant  for  these  assumptions :  ( 1 )  the  influence  of  Hume's  atomistic 
and  impressionistic  theory  of  knowledge.  (Kant's  doctrine  of 
sensation  seems  to  be  derived  from  Hume's  doctrine  that  our 
seeming  world  is  compounded,  by  the  principles  of  association,  out 
of  atomistic  sense-impressions.  This  accounts  for  Kant's  first 
assumption.)  (2)  The  influence  of  the  antinomies  or  contradic- 
tions involved,  as  Kant  thought,  in  admitting  the  objective  reality 
of  space,  time  and  causality. 

But  Humian  atomism  is  psychologically  false.  There  is  no 
actual  state  or  phase  of  experience,  however  primitive,  which  con- 
sists of  atomistic  sense  impressions  or  particles  of  color,  sound, 
shape,  size,  smell,  etc.,  which  are  afterwards  patched  together  into 


KNOWLEDGE  AND   REALITY  77 

percepts.8  As  for  the  second  assumption,  some  other  and  less 
violent  way  can  be  found  to  escape  the  seeming  contradiction  in 
admitting  that  space,  time,  and  causality  represent  true  aspects 
of  the  real  world  order. 

3.  The  dialectical  phenomenalism  of  Bradley  proceeds,  by  a 
critical  analysis  of  things,  qualities,  relations,  space,  time,  the 
self,  and  the  subject-object  relation  in  knowing  and  willing,  to  show 
that  all  these  phases  of  knowing  are  involved  in  hopeless  contra- 
dictions. The  ideal  of  truth  and  reality  is  an  individual  whole, 
consistent  or  harmonious  in  itself,  an  all-inclusive,  systematic 
unity,  embracing  all  finite  diversities  in  one  perfect  individual 
experience.  All  appearances  are  present  in  it  and  it  is  present  in 
all  appearances,  but  in  different  degrees.  The  absolute  reality 
lives  in  all  its  appearances,  and  in  it  they  are  all  transmuted,  in 
various  degrees,  into  the  harmony  of  the  whole. 

We  cannot  tell  what  the  absolute  is  like  in  detail,  but  we  can 
know  its  general  features  for,  in  immediate  experience  or  feeling, 
especially  in  love  and  esthetic  feeling,  we  have  experiences  which 
are  one  and  many,  unity-in-diversity.  Bradley's  phenomenalism 
thus  differs  from  other  forms  in  that  he  holds  that,  while  thought 
does  not  give  us  a  knowledge  of  reality  in  detail,  it  does  tell  us  what 
reality  must  be  like  as  a  whole.  It  gives  us  the  general  outlines ; 
thus  knowledge  points  beyond  itself  towards  a  more  perfect  whole 
into  which  it  is  transmuted.  Knowledge,  in  the  sense  of  reflective 
thought,  is  not  invalidated  in  its  own  sphere.  It  is  incomplete,  but 
good  as  far  as  it  goes.  Thought  is  immanent  in  reality ;  it  grows 
out  of  immediate  experience  and  its  function  is  to  render  the  latter 
more  coherent  and  significant ;  but  it  can  never  apprehend  the  true 
and  harmonious  nature  of  the  real,  since  it  is  always  infected  with 
duality.  Thought  divorces  the  "that"  or  immediate  richness  of 
sensuous  experience  and  feeling  from  the  "what"  or  meaning;  it 
analyzes  or  breaks  up  the  immediate  existence  which  is  concrete 
experience,  and  can  never  get  the  parts  together  into  a  perfect 
whole.  The  fate  of  reflective  thinking  in  Mr.  Bradley's  system 
reminds  one  of  Humpty  Dumpty.  I  shall  have  occasion  from  time 
to  time  to  consider  this  and  other  features  of  Mr.  Bradley's  doc- 
trine and  shall  not  discuss  it  here. 

8  As  James  Ward  has  shown,  knowledge  develops  as  a  progressive  differen- 
tiation in  a  continuum  of  experience.  See  his  article  "Psychology"  in  the 
Encyclopedia  Britannica,  11th  edition,  and  Psychological  Principles. 


78  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

M.  Bergson's  whole  philosophy  rests  on  the  contrast  between 
the  functions  of  intelligence  and  of  intuition.9  Intelligence  is 
adapted  to  deal  only  with  the  inert,  the  solid,  the  homogeneous  or 
spatialized ;  it  is  at  home  with  matter ;  its  model  of  procedure  is 
geometry,  the  science  of  static  and  homogeneous  spatial  form. 
Keality  is  flux,  duration,  interpenetration,  the  creative  movement 
of  the  vital  impulse  or  life  urge.  The  nature  of  reality  is  appre- 
hended directly  by  intuition.  "By  intuition  is  meant  the  kind  of 
intellectual  sympathy  by  which  one  places  oneself  within  an 
object  in  order  to  coincide  with  what  is  unique  in  it  and  conse- 
quently inexpressible.  ...  To  analyze  is  to  express  a  thing  as  a 
function  of  something  other  than  itself.  All  analysis  is  thus  a 
translation,  a  development  into  symbols."  10  Thus  analysis  does 
not  tell  us  what  anything  really  is;  to  get  the  real  and  unique 
being  or  nature  of  anything  we  must  have  resort  to  intuition.  But 
we  have,  or  may  have,  an  intuition  of  one  being — our  self.  There- 
fore, in  order  to  find  the  clue  to  reality,  we  must,  by  an  act  of 
intellectual  sympathy  or  intuition,  place  ourselves  within  ourselves. 
Metaphysics  is  possible,  that  is,  first-hand  knowledge  of  reality  is 
possible,  only  if  symbols  can  be  dispensed  with.  This  can  be  done 
if  one  begin  with  intuition  of  oneself.  "No  image  or  concept  can 
reproduce  exactly  the  original  feeling  I  have  of  the  flow  of  my  own 
conscious  life.  But  it  is  not  even  necessary  that  I  should  attempt 
to  render  it.  If  a  man  is  incapable  of  getting  for  himself  the  intui- 
tion of  the  constitutive  duration  of  his  own  being,  nothing  will 
ever  give  it  to  him,  concepts  no  more  than  images.  Here  the  single 
aim  of  the  philosopher  should  be  to  promote  a  certain  effort,  which 
in  most  men  is  usually  fettered  by  habits  of  mind  more  useful  to 
life."  "  These  habits  are  the  intellectual  habits  of  measuring  and 
operating  on  solids.  Thus,  for  M.  Bergson,  knowledge  of  reality 
is  reached  at  all  points  by  interpreting  it  in  terms  derived  from 
the  intuition  of  oneself  as  a  being  which  is  a  continuous  creative 
advance,  a  flux  in  which  all  its  elements  interpenetrate;  which  is 
all  at  once,  "variety  of  qualities,  continuity  of  progress,  and  unity 
of  direction."  12 


0  The  clearest  and  most  concise  statement  of  M.  Bergson 's  theory  of 
knowledge  will  be  found  in  his  An  Introduction  to  Metaphysics,  translated  by 
T.  E.  Tlulme,  from  which  I  quote.  (There  is  another  translation  entitled  An 
Introduction  to  a  New  Philosophy.) 

lorbid,  p.  7. 

u  An  Introduction  to  Metaphysics,  pp.  15,  16.  uIbid.,  p.  15. 


KNOWLEDGE  AND   REALITY  79 

M.  Bergson  assumes  that  whatever  is  real  is,  in  some  degree, 
like  a  self,  therefore  whatsoever  kind  or  degree  of  knowledge  does 
not  acquaint  us  with  some  bit  or  vortex  of  psychical  flux,  some 
rudimentary  or  developed  soul,  is  simply  not  genuine  knowledge. 
If  reality  be  mind-energy,  then,  since  I  know  directly  only  my  own 
mind-energy,  the  intuitive  act  by  which  I  possess  this  self- 
knowledge  is  the  only  kind  of  knowledge  worthy  of  the  name. 
Therefore  neither  geometry  nor  any  science  which  uses  geometry 
gives  us  knowledge ;  in  order  to  know  reality  all  I  have  to  do  is  to 
enter  within  myself  by  intellectual  sympathy;  having  learned  to 
know  myself,  I  must  dilate  or  dilute  this  self-intuition  and  I  shall 
know  something  about  everything,  since  every  thing  is  a  bit  of 
mind-energy  or  pure  duration. 

I  find  in  this  theory  of  knowledge  Fichte  and  Schelling 
redivivus.  Die  intellecluelle  Anschauung  is  poetized,  dressed  up 
in  an  attractive  literary  garb  and  furbished  out  with  an  array  of 
scientific  facts.  I  cannot  grant  the  initial  assumption  that,  because 
the  knower  is  always  an  ego  or  individual,  therefore  all  that  he 
knows  must  be  known  in  precisely  the  same  way  that  he  knows  that 
he  has  a  toothache  or  is  in  love ;  from  which  it  would  follow  that 
everything  really  known  or  knowable  must  be  like  the  ego.  This 
is  "malicious"  philosophy,  indeed.  It  is  the  "egocentric  predica- 
ment" with  a  vengeance.  It  would  seem  an  easy  step,  from  the 
position  that  all  that  one  knows  is  like  one's  ego,  to  the  position 
that  all  that  one  knows  as  real  is  a  part  of  one's  ego.  M.  Bergson's 
theory  of  knowledge  escapes  none  of  the  difficulties  of  psychological 
idealism  or  mentalism.  It  only  appears  to  do  so,  because  he 
assumes,  in  the  spirit  of  physical  dynamism  or  energetics,  that  the 
physical  world  consists  solely  of  various  rates  of  movement,  of 
mobilities  having  a  variety  of  tensions  but  no  things  that  move; 
and  because  he  assumes  that  our  perceptions  are  condensations  and 
frozen  images  of  the  labile  mobilities.  I  do  not  understand  how 
the  intellect  can  have  been  developed  as  the  most  successful  instru- 
ment for  the  adjustment  of  the  vital  impulse  to  materiality,  if 
materiality  be  itself  the  frozen  images  produced  by  the  intellect, 
and  if  this  highly  successful  instrument  so  grossly  distorts  and 
petrifies  the  reality  to  which  the  individual  bits  of  the  vital  impulse 
must  adapt  themselves  in  order  to  survive  and  prosper.  Either  the 
material  conditions  to  which  the  intellect  must  adapt  itself  are 
presupposed,  and  the  processes  of  perception  and  conception  are 


80  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

successful  adaptations  thereto,  and  therefore  not  distortions 
thereof;  or  else  perception  and  conception  engender  illusions,  and 
beings  who  act  upon  these  illusions  as  true  must  perish.  If  intelli- 
gence so  mangles  reality  that  we  can  get  a  true  glimpse  of  the  latter 
only  by  looking  within  our  own  bosoms,  how  has  it  happened  that 
the  most  intelligent  animals  have  acquired  the  greatest  powers  of 
survival  ?  I  do  not  question  the  reality  of  what  I  see  when  I  look 
within  myself ;  but,  if  this  be  the  only  kind  of  reality,  how  comes 
it  that  I  survive  and  grow  in  physical  and  mental  stature  by  taking 
account  of  and  adapting  my  life  to  a  kind  of  thing  that,  on  the  face 
of  it,  seems  to  be  quite  other  than  what  I  find  when  I  look  within  ? 
If  there  be  really  no  "other"  than  mind  or  psychical  life  in  the 
universe,  why  the  persistent  seeming  of  an  other?  Why  should 
minds  grow  by  adaptation  to  this  other  ?  Fichte  explains  the  gene- 
sis of  materiality  from  the  moral  vocation  of  the  ego.  The  physical 
world  for  him  exists  only  as  "the  sensuous  material  of  our  duties," 
the  shock  or  stimulus  which  is  the  occasion  for  the  development  of 
the  rational  will.  But,  if  the  material  be  only  unconscious  will, 
why  should  this  occasion  be  necessary  ?  For  Fichte  the  material 
world  is  engendered  by  the  will  as  a  kind  of  punching-bag  on  which 
it  may  get  up  its  muscle  by  becoming  consciously  rational.  For 
M.  Bergson  the  intelligence  is  developed  by  the  vital  impetus  as  a 
successful  tool  for  adaptation  to  the  material  conditions  of  living; 
but  matter,  in  turn,  appears  to  be  the  by-product  of  the  intelligence. 
The  existence  of  matter  is  a  condition  of  the  existence  of  intelli- 
gence; but,  intelligence,  in  turn,  materializes  life.  This  is  per- 
plexing. I  cannot  make  out  whether  dualism  is,  for  M.  Bergson, 
merely  a  provisional  starting  point  or  an  intractable  feature  of 
reality.  Certainly  he  has  failed  to  account  for  matter,  just  as 
Fichte  did.  All  attempts  to  explain  the  genesis  of  matter  are  but 
idle  and  pretentious  wordplay.  Our  conceptions  of  matter  may 
become  more  dynamic  and  ethereal ;  but,  if  we  think  that  we  are 
deriving  it  from  something  immaterial  we  cheat  ourselves  with 
empty  phrases. 

I  do  not  deny  that  our  richest  states  of  knowing  are  Intuitive 
Acts,  in  which  we  comprehend,  in  a  synoptic  insight  or  vision, 
organized  or  living  wholes  of  data  into  which  the  results  of  dis- 
cursive thinking  have  been  absorbed.  I  do  reject  the  wooden 
conception  of  intelligence  which  M.  Bergson  has,  and  the  claim 
that  instinct  is  superior  to  intelligence.    It  is  true  that  dogs,  birds 


KNOWLEDGE  AND  REALITY  81 

and  insects  do  some  things  in  ways  that  we  do  not  understand ;  but, 
after  all,  compared  to  the  animals,  man's  capacity  for  adaptation 
is  indefinitely  greater.  When  M.  Bergson  speaks  of  intuition  as 
being  instinct  dilated  by  intelligence  I  do  not  know  what  he  means 
unless  it  be  immediate  experience  interpreted  by  reflective  thought ; 
if  the  latter  be  his  meaning  it  would  have  been  much  less  mysteri- 
ous to  have  said  so,  but  it  would  not  have  sounded  like  a  mystical 
oracle. 

I  pass  to  a  statement  of  my  own  theory  of  the  place  of  knowl- 
edge with  reference  to  experience  and  reality. 

Knowing  is  not  an  affair  external  to  the  objects  known.  It  is 
a  transaction  between  a  center  of  feeling,  thought  and  action  which 
is  an  immanent  member  of  the  real  world  and  other  items  in  the 
world.  Knowing  is  a  function  of  a  conscious  organism,  in  inter- 
play with  other  dynamic  entities,  just  as  walking  or  eating  are. 
An  adequate  account  of  what  knowledge  is  cannot  be  given  if  one 
begin  with  the  assumption  that  the  individual,  as  knower,  is  shut 
up  within  his  own  psychical  skin  and  can  only  get  into  touch  with 
the  real  world  by  some  sort  of  mortal  leap  of  self-transcendence. 
Knowledge  does  not  begin  with  an  introspective  examination  of 
subjective  states  "sicklied  o'er  with  the  pale  cast  of  thought."  It 
is  only  the  complete  failure  of  belief  and  expectation  that  leads  to 
such  a  condition  of  mind.  Doubt  has  cognitive  value  as  the 
prelude  to  gathering  oneself  together  and  taking  a  fresh  start  at 
grasping  the  meanings  of  things.  The  mind  is  a  function  of  the 
world.  It  is  a  live  focus  of  reality,  an  organized  center  in  which 
reality  comes  into  active  awareness  of  its  own  modes  of  behavior. 
Since  the  percipient  organism  is  an  individuated  expression  of  the 
world's  life,  the  qualities-in-relation  that  are  cognized  in  perception 
are  actual  aspects  of  the  real  world. 

The  relation  between  the  qualities  perceived  and  the  mind 
perceiving  them  is  one  of  immediate  and  partial  identity.  Images 
and  concepts  blend  with  perception;  and  images  and  concepts 
represent  or  stand  for  possible  immediate  experiences;  actual 
knowledge  is  always  a  fusion,  in  varying  proportions,  of  immediacy 
and  mediacy.  To  know  is  to  be  conscious  of,  to  apprehend  in 
meanings,  the  linkages  of  things.  Awareness  is  awakened,  and 
developed  into  increasing  awareness,  by  the  stresses,  the  strains  and 
conflicts,  the  urgent  problems  in  the  living  energies  of  existence; 
and  these  stresses  or  problems  of  living  existence  are  located. 


82  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

interpreted  and  resolved  through  awareness.  Truth  is  the  organic 
interdependence  of  subject  and  object,  and  this  is  always  the 
partial  consciousness  of  a  dynamic  relational  whole  or  complex. 
The  real  world  is  a  systematic  unity  of  living  experients  and 
experiences.  Each  is  a  function  of  the  other.  Eliminate  either 
and  the  other  vanishes  into  the  limbo  of  the  unknowable.  Knowl- 
edge is  that  function  of  the  real  world  operating  in  thinking  organ- 
isms by  which  the  organism  becomes  aware,  in  increasing  detail 
and  extent,  of  its  own  qualities  and  the  qualities  of  its  environment 
in  their  mutual  relations — to  the  end  that  there  may  be  "more  life 
and  fuller." 

Modern  epistemology,  from  Descartes  and  Locke  down  through 
Kant  to  those  who  maintain  to-day  the  possibility  of  an  inde- 
pendent science  of  epistemology,  has  been  vitiated  by  the  covert 
"psychologistic"  assumption  that  the  business  of  knowing,  all  the 
way  from  perception  to  the  finest-spun  speculation,  is  a  purely 
theoretical  or  contemplative  gazing  at,  or  reflecting  of,  a  reality 
different  from  the  knower  and  set  apart  from  his  life.  It  was 
forgotten  that  a  knower  shut  up  within  himself  would  not  only 
cease  to  know,  he  would  cease  to  be.  Hegel,  of  course,  broke 
through  the  vicious  circle  and  escaped  the  artificial  maze  created  by 
the  false  assumption  that  the  mind  is  shut  off  from  reality  other 
than  itself ;  but,  owing  to  the  persistent  influence  of  Locke,  Hume 
and  Kant,  philosophers  have  kept  on  pondering  on  how  to  liberate 
the  knower  from  the  prison  cell  of  his  own  subjectivity;  by  this 
auto-hypnosis,  worthy  of  the  Hindu  mystic  who  reaches  Nirvana 
by  fixation  of  his  gaze  on  his  navel  and  the  repetition  of  Omi  mcmi 
padme  hum,  they  have  produced  a  mass  of  verbiage  and  brought 
philosophy  into  disrepute  with  the  healthy-minded. 

Lately,  the  biological  conception  of  the  constant  interplay  of 
organism  and  environment,  the  pragmatic  and  behavioristic  move- 
ments and  the  influence  of  Bergson  and  the  realistic  movement, 
have  aided  in  the  delivery  of  philosophy  from  the  impasse  of  sub- 
jectivism. As  Hegel  truly  saw,  thought  (in  the  large  sense)  and 
reality  must  be  in  principle  identical,  since  thought  is  a  bit  of 
reality  become  aware  of  its  relations.  This  does  not  mean  that  the 
individual  can  excogitate  the  world  out  of  his  private  conscious- 
ness; such  an  enterprise  only  reveals  the  emptiness  of  his  private 
selfhood ;  it  means  that  knowledge  is  attained  by  the  individual's 
submission  to  the  discipline  of  the  factual  order.     Since  the  think- 


KNOWLEDGE  AND   REALITY  83 

ing  organism  is  a  product  of  the  world,  perception  and  thinking 
are  instruments  of  successful  adaptation  and  enjoyable  intercourse 
with  the  environment.  But  to  assume,  as  Bergson  seems  to,  that 
since  perception  and  intelligence  are  instruments  of  practice, 
therefore  they  do  not  reveal  the  really  real,  is  to  betray  the  influ- 
ence of  subjectivism;  just,  as  on  the  other  hand,  to  narrow  the 
scope  of  knowing  to  mere  overt  action,  excluding  contemplation 
and  aesthetic  enjoyment,  is  to  take  a  very  parochial  view  of  thought. 

Thought  does  not  come  at  immediate  experience  from  without. 
It  does  not  descend  upon  the  latter  from  a  rationalist  or  a  priori 
heaven,  nor  is  it  born  by  a  mysterious  parthenogenesis  from  a 
virgin  experience  barren  of  meaning  and  relational  structure.  No 
bit  of  the  crudest  experience  is  wholly  devoid  of  relations.  The 
various  types  of  relationship — likeness  and  difference,  identity  and 
diversity,  spatial  and  numerical  relations  of  order  and  magnitude, 
temporal  succession  and  simultaneity,  cause  and  effect,  value  and 
individuality,  the  discovery  of  which  is  the  work  of  thought — are 
already  embedded  in  the  texture  of  immediate  experience.  The 
latter  is  from  the  outset  of  its  career  implicitly  relational  or  orderly 
and  significant.  If  it  were  not  so  the  foreign  importations  of 
reflective  thinking  would  not  result  in  coherent  and  workable 
meanings,  honored  by  the  actual  course  of  experience.  There 
would  be  a  deadlock  between  the  demands  of  reflective  living  and 
the  actual  world  of  fact.  Thought  is  the  self-adjusting  function 
of  conscious  individuals  by  which  actual  experience  is  ever  being 
more  fully  interpreted,  harmonized,  and  enlarged.  Thought  shoots 
forth  at  critical  points  in  the  lives  of  selves  as  an  instrument  for 
their  development  and  self-maintenance. 

Thus  thought,  the  interpretative  function  of  personal  experi- 
ence, and  knowledge  its  product,  do  not  in  principle  or  character 
transcend  experience.  The  reflective  interpretation  of  experience 
may,  and  does  as  matter  of  fact,  often  require  that  thought  go 
beyond  actual  experience  in  the  interest  of  the  latter's  rational 
fulfillment  or  harmony.  But  this  going  beyond  immediate  and 
individuated  experience  is  not  a  passage  into  another  order  of 
being.  Our  conceptual  interpolations  and  extrapolations  must  be 
consistent  and  continuous  with  the  experienced  reality  if  they  are 
to  have  meaning  and  efficacy. 

In  perceptual  knowing  the  knower  is  cognitively  one  with  the 
objects  of  his  knowledge,  although  as  practical  agent  or  emotional 


84  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

center  lie  may  have  a  very  different  character  and  existence  from 
the  objects  with  which  his  aims  and  emotions  are  connected.  We 
do  not  know  perceptual  reality  through  the  intervention  of  a 
teriium  quid  in  the  way  of  sensations  and  ideas  interpolated,  and 
constituting  a  veil  hung  between  our  minds  and  the  real  objects. 
Parts  of  reality,  namely  the  perceptual  reality  of  the  external 
world,  our  own  felt  existence  as  selves,  and  the  existence  of  our 
neighbors'  bodies,  we  know  directly  although  but  partially ;  and  in 
thus  knowing  are  in  immediate  communion  with  them.  Other 
parts  of  reality,  namely  conceptual  reality  or  those  logical  inter- 
polations and  completions  of  empirical  reality  which  constitute 
matters  of  rational  belief  about  reality  we  believe  to  exist  because 
of  their  consistency  and  continuity  with  empirical  reality. 

For  actual  experience  is  a  continuum  in  which  the  felt  existence 
of  the  self  who  has  the  experience  is  central,  a  single  whole  with 
distinctions  and  relations  internal  to  it.  It  is  always  some  sort  of 
system.  It  is  never,  at  any  stage  in  the  life  of  the  experient  and 
in  the  growth  of  his  field  of  experience,  a  chaotic  manifold  of 
sensations.13  The  central  item  in  the  continuum,  for  the  indi- 
vidual experient,  is  his  own  body.  His  own  skin  is  usually  the 
most  significant  boundary  line  in  his  experience,  for  inside  it  are 
feelings  of  desire  and  aversion,  restlessness  and  quiescence,  un- 
easiness and  satisfaction,  pleasure  and  pain.  Through  the  double- 
ness  of  the  sensory  experiences  of  his  body  and  the  constant  union 
of  these  double  sense  data  with  affections  or  feelings,  his  own  body, 
and  later  his  psychical  selfhood,  is  cut  out  from  the  rest  of  the 
world.  It  is  in  terms  of  behavior  or  interaction  between  his  own 
body,  and  other  bodies,  animate  and  inanimate,  that  the  growing 
[  individual  learns  to  discriminate  between  himself  and  all  other 
things,  between  living  and  nonliving  bodies,  and  betvjeen  persons 
'■  or  conscious,  thinking  and  willing  beings,  and  things  that  are  not 
persons.  In  early  thought  we  do  not  find  the  distinction  clearly 
drawn  between  the  animate  and  the  inanimate,  or  between  persons 
and  animate  beings  that  are  not  persons.  Even  to-day  it  is  diffi- 
cult for  the  dog  lover  not  to  attribute  the  rudiments  of  personality 
to  his  dog. 

It  is  not  my  purpose  here  to  repeat  the  work  of  genetic  psychol- 

"  Kant  's  conception  of  the  chaotic  manifold  of  sense,  an  inheritance  from 
Hume's  atomistic  impressions,  is  an  epistemological  myth.  In  this  respect 
James'  "pure  experience"  is  a  truer  concept  of  crude  experience. 


KNOWLEDGE  AND  REALITY  85 

ogy  in  tracing  the  differentiation,  within  the  continuum  of  the 
individual's  experience,  into  self,  other  selves,  and  not-selves.14  It 
is  clear  that  the  distinctions  between  these  entities  have  developed 
together,  and  pari  passu.  The  individual  can  have  a  clear  con- 
sciousness of  living  beings  only  in  so  far  as  at  the  same  time  he 
has  a  clear  consciousness  of  nonliving  beings.  He  gains  a  vivid 
sense  of  the  meanings  of  selfhood  and  personality  in  himself  only 
through  the  give  and  take  of  social  intercourse;  that  is,  in  so  far 
as  he  recognizes  other  selves  and  persons,  and  interprets  himself 
to  himself  in  terms  of  their  behavior,  and  themselves  to  himself  in 
terms  of  his  own  feelings  and  meanings  of  which  he  knows  directly. 

The  objective  world  of  the  developed  mind  is  a  socialized  recon- 
struction of  the  continuum  of  primitive  experience;  a  differen- 
tiating, that  is,  a  contrasting  and  relating  of  physical  things,  other 
selves  and  myself  in  interaction,  interpassion  and  thus  in  inter- 
communion. 

The  theory  that  I  make  my  world  by  projecting  or  ejecting  my 
sensations  or  ideas  out  from  my  head  is  an  epistemological  myth. 
As  James  Ward  says,  if  this  were  true  then  everything  would  go 
into  my  head  including  the  head  itself.  Avenarius  says  that  the 
theory  of  ideas  as  immediate  data  existing  in  heads  (which  is  the 
basis  of  the  copy  theory  of  knowledge)  is  due  to  man's  attempt  to 
picture  to  himself  how  things  were  present  to  another  self.15  I 
have  no  difficulty  in  knowing  how  things  of  sense  are  present  to 
me — they  are  present  in  their  immediate  realness  though  but  par- 
tially so.  But  the  other  fellow's  soul  or  mind  is  not  one  of  my 
sense  data*.  In  terms  of  the  primitive  soul  theory,  I  may  think  of 
his  head  as  containing  ideas  or  images,  just  like  the  ideas  or  images 
that  I  have  (in  dreaming  or  reverie)  of  things  not  present  to  sense. 
The  assumption  is  that  the  thing  as  he  sees  it  is  an  image  which  is 
part  of  a  series  of  images  which  constitute  the  furniture  of  his 
soul,  but  which  he  projects  or  ejects  out  into  circumambient  space. 
But  the  truth  is  that  his  experience  is  a  continuum  of  interacting 
and  intersuffering  factors,  a  mode  of  organic  behavior  to  which  his 

"See,  especially,  Wm.  James,  Psychology,  Vol.  I,  Chap.  10;  and  J.  M. 
Baldwin,  Social  and  Ethical  Interpretations  of  Mental  Development. 

18  I  think  Avenarius'  explanation  is  insufficient.  I  have  the  same  problem 
in  connection  with  my  own  images  of  past  events  or  objects  not  now  present 
to  sense.  In  the  latter  cases  I  assume  that  my  "ideas"  or  "images"  are 
mental  copies  of  the  reality.  One  does  not  need  to  consider  how  the  othei 
man  knows  to  be  led  to  the  hypothesis  that  ideas  are  copies  of  things. 


86  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

own  body,  is  central,  just  as  mine  is.  His  world  is  immediately 
present  to  him,  as  mine  is  to  me ;  because  the  relationships  between 
our  bodies  and  the  other  elements  of  our  world  are  organic  and 
dynamical,  and  the  center  of  each  man's  world  is  the  felt  locus  of 
the  suffering  and  enjoyment  of  the  subject  or  ego  himself.  Grad- 
ually there  arises  the  distinction — still  within  the  whole  continuum 
of  experience — between  the  psychical  centers  of  energy  and 
resistance,  of  feeling,  purposive  striving,  meaning-seeking  and 
finding  (and  to  seek  a  meaning  is  to  seek  satisfaction  of  an  interest 
or  feeling  just  as  much  as  to  seek  a  meal  is)  ;  the  physical  centers 
or  clusters  of  energy ;  and,  as  the  intermediating  link,  the  physio- 
logical acts  and  sufferings  through  which  the  psychical  and  the 
physical  worlds  have  intercourse.  The  distinction  is  always  made 
in  terms  of  behavior.  A  sense  quality  is  a  mode  of  behavior ;  just 
as  a  self's  feeling  of  pleasure,  pain,  striving,  averting,  meaning, 
thinking,  are  modes  of  behavior.  The  continuum  of  the  individual 
organism's  experience  is,  at  all  stages  of  its  differentiation  and 
integration,  a  system  of  interacting  centers  of  energy.  The  in- 
animate thing,  the  living  body,  the  soul  or  person,  is  that  which 
energizes  in  the  unique  way  which  is  known  as  its  qualities,  or 
ways  of  beliaving  in  relation  to  the  various  other  himds  of  behaving 
complexes.  The  object  hitting,  pushing,  resisting,  meeting  or  fol- 
lowing another — these  are  comparatively  simple  ways  in  which 
complexes  of  qualities  act  and  suffer.  An  object,  feeling,  observ- 
ing, thinking,  striving  in  relation  to  other  like  or  different  objects, 
is  a  comparatively  complex  mode  of  behavior,  which  we  call  a 
self. 

But,  thus  far,  we  have  not  taken  full  account  of  the  fact  that 
each  individual  has  his  own  continuum  of  experience,  his  own 
world.  Are  not  all  these  private  worlds  ?  Is  not  each  individual, 
as  experiencing  and  energizing  center,  a  windowless  monad  ?  No ! 
for  he  cannot  experience  without  energizing  and  he  cannot  energize 
without  experiencing  other  beings.  "Private"  implies  "public." 
The  only  private  thing  in  my  world  is  my  body,  and  even  that  is 
not  wholly  private.  You  do  not  experience  my  feelings,  but  you 
experience  parts  of  my  body  as  a  part  of  your  world.  Your 
physical  world  and  mine  are  not  wholly  identical,  for  the  reason 
that  you  experience  the  space-whole  and  the  temporal  and  dynam- 
ical sequence  from  your  unique  position  and  the  series  of  unique 
moments  in  your  history,  and  I  from  mine,  likewise.     But  our 


KNOWLEDGE  AND   REALITY  87 

worlds  are  not  shut  off  from  one  another.  If  they  were  we  could 
never  recognize  each  other,  communicate  or  cooperate.  Physical 
reality  is  the  system  of  moving  complexes  of  qualities,  continuous 
with  each  experience,  that  we  must  each  take  account  of  in  the 
satisfaction  of  his  interests.  But,  in  dealing  with  physical  things, 
and  in  satisfying  our  interests,  we  must  often,  to  an  even  greater 
degree,  take  account  of  social  reality — of  other  selves.  The 
physical  world  is  the  spatial  and  temporal  continuum  in  which  we 
meet,  act  and  suffer;  that  is,  our  individual  experiences  are  be- 
lieved to  be  similar  aspects  of  the  same  continuum.  The  physical 
order,  in  short,  is  real  not  for  me  by  myself  but  for  me  as  a  mem- 
ber of  society.  I  know  myself  as  a  self  only  by  contrast,  conflict, 
partial  agreement  and  cooperation,  with  other  selves.  I  know  my 
own  body  only  in  distinction  from  and  interrelation  with  other 
bodies.  But,  of  these  other  bodies,  some  are  more  like  mv  own  in 
ways  of  behaving  than  they  are  different  from  it.  I  am  compelled 
to  conclude  that  the  latter  type  of  body  is  associated  with  a  sentient 
self.  I  could  not  know  my  bodily  self  as  such  except  by  contrast, 
comparison  and  interrelation  with  other  bodies;  but  I  could  not 
recognize  myself  as  psychical  self  except  by  recognizing  other 
psychical  selves.  These  exist  inferentially  for  me  through  my 
experience  of  the  behavior  of  certain  bodies.  To  sum  up,  it  is 
impossible  that  I  should  know  myself,  even  in  my  utmost  degrees 
of  privacy,  without  knowing  both  another  self  and  a  public  not-self. 
1 1  is  impossible  that  I  should  know  a  public,  physical  realm  with- 
out recognizing  other  selves.  It  is  impossible  that  I  should  recog- 
nize these  selves  without  admitting  the  existence  of  bodies  that 
are  not  my  mere  subjective  states,  and  not  the  subjective  states 
of  some  other  self. 

To  sum  up,  knowledge  of  myself,  of  other  selves  and  of  a  com- 
mon physical  world  in  which  we  meet,  fight,  cooperate,  ignore,  or 
love  one  another,  and  with  which  we  strive  or  drift,  are  differen- 
tiations in  the  continuum  of  primitive  experience  which  develop 
together  and  interdependently.  The  common  or  physical  aspects 
of  experience  are  socially  accessible  objects,  but  society  is  equally 
a  property  of  the  physical  world.  Thus  self,  other-self  and 
physical  nature  are  distinctions  or  differentiations  within  the 
objective  continuum  of  experience;  which  is  seen,  through 
reflective  analysis  and  synthesis,  to  be  a  system  of  interacting 
centers  of  energy,  some  of  which  feel  the  interactions  and  thus  are 


88  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

feeling  centers  sufficiently  alike  to  be  recognized  as  having  an 
identical  nature. 

The  self  and  the  other  self  have  each  his  own  experience ;  but 
each  knows  himself  in  relation  to  the  other ;  and  the  physical  world 
is  primarily  the  enduring  though  changing  ground  of  the  com- 
munity of  intercourse  and  experience  between  selves;  the  other 
ground  is  the  community  of  nature  in  the  different  selves.  Every 
self  is  a  unique  or  private  center"  of  feeling ;  but  a  common  world 
is  recognized  because  selves  recognize  that  they  not  only  perceive 
but  feel  and  act  similarly.  Feeling  is  the  significance  of  experi- 
ence for  a  sentient  organism. 

Is  not  an  immediate  acquaintance  with  other  selves  just  as 
necessary  an  assumption  to  account  for  knowledge  as  an  immediate 
acquaintance  with  some  aspects  of  things  physical  ?  Yes :  but  in 
neither  case  does  the  immediacy  of  acquaintance  exclude  mediacy 
in  the  logical  sense.  The  physical  thing,  which  seems  to  be  a 
wholly  immediate  and  present  object  in  sense-perception,  is  a 
blending  of  actual  sensory  experiences  with  memories  and  inter- 
pretations. It  is,  in  large  part,  a  construction  of  thought.  This 
construction  arises  through  the  fusion  of  qualities  present  to 
sense  with  memory-images  controlled  by  interest  and  association 
and  with  intellectual  interpretation  controlled  by  interest. 

Just  so  with  our  knowledge  of  other  selves.  The  basis  of  my 
instantaneous  recognition  of  another  self  is  a  specific  complex  of 
immediate  sense-qualities  interwoven  with  relevant,  and  some- 
times too  with  accidentally,  associated  parts  of  my  past  experiences 
of  similar  complexes,  and  previous  interpretations  thereof ;  it  may 
involve  too  a  novel  constructive  interpretation,  a  discovery  of  some 
qualities  that  I  had  not  previously  associated  with  a  self.  I  am 
instantly  aware  of  the  other  self ;  but  that  awareness  is  a  blend  of 
qualities  present  to  sense  with  purposive  interpretation,  motivated 
by  my  present  affections,  interests,  and  aims. 

Another  self  is  for  me  a  being  like  myself  of  which  I  must  take 
account  in  the  fulfillment  of  my  own  interests.  It  evinces  by  its 
sensed  behavior,  as  interpreted  by  me,  purposes  that  are  like  my 
actual  purposes  or  like  other  purposes  that  I  might  have  under 
other  conditions ;  purposes  that  may  cooperate  or  conflict  with  my 
own  deepest  interests.  I  perceive  the  activities  of  that  complex 
of  qualities  which  I  call  another  self,  and  I  read  interests  and 
purposes  into  those  activities.     I  believe  that  being  to  be  a  self. 


KNOWLEDGE  AND   REALITY  89 

because  it  shows  features  of  behavior  analogous  to  my  own  be- 
havior, actual  or  possible;  which  follow  hard  upon  by  feelings,  in- 
terests, aims.  It  displays  intelligent  adaptiveness,  varied  signs  of 
individuality,  even  unto  dangerous  passion.  Therefore  I  say  it  is 
an  individual  which  feels  and  thinks.  I  cannot  help  believing  so. 
The  deepest  concords  and  the  most  heart-quaking  conflicts  in  our 
affectional  and  purposive  lives  are  engendered  by  the  reinforce- 
ment and  thwarting  of  our  interests  by  other  centers  of  action  and 
resistance  in  the  environment.  Therefore  our  deepest  instinct  is 
to  believe  that  these  are  selves  like  unto  ourselves.  I  can  only 
recognize  the  presence  in  another  self  of  that  which  corresponds  to 
feelings  and  purposes  that  I  have,  or  remember  that  I  have  had, 
or  imagine  that  I  might  have.  On  the  other  hand,  my  own  indi- 
vidual and  purposive  life  is  constantly  being  quickened  in  feeling 
and  thought,  and  stirred  to  action,  by  the  cross-currents  of  experi- 
ence which  play  between  my  self  and  other  selves. 

How  does  the  distinction  between  the  physical  and  the 
psychical  arise  ?  How  does  man  come  to  think  of  an  inner  self 
at  all  ?  The  first  distinction  made  is  between  one's  own  bodv  and 
other  bodies,  Because  of  the  doubleness  of  sensory  experience 
when  one  part  of  the  organism  is  in  contact  with  another  part  of 
the  same  organism,  as  contrasted  with  the  singleness  of  sensory 
experience  when  the  organism  is  in  contact  with  an  external  body, 
the  percipient's  own  organism  is  marked  off  from  all  other  bodies. 
The  first  division  in  experience  is  thus  between  the  bodily  self  and 
the  world  of  not-self.  The  distinction  between  the  bodily  self  or 
organism  and  the  psychical  self  is  a  comparatively  late  product  of 
human  reflection.  In  Greek  thought,  for  example,  one  does  not 
find  it  made  sharply  before  Plato.  And  even  then  the  soul  is 
identified  with  the  natural  life-principle,  as  it  is  in  Hebrew 
thought  until  shortly  before  the  advent  of  Jesus.  In  New  Testa- 
ment thought  the  distinction  is  made  between  the  body,  the  soul 
or  natural  principle  of  sentient  life,  and  the  spirit  or  moral  per- 
sonality. In  primitive  thought  generally  the  soul  is  the  "double" 
of  the  body,  a  finer  and  more  subtle  material  facsimile  of  the  body, 
which  it  can  leave  and  reenter;  the  soul  is  a  shadow,  a  mannikin 
or  image  of  the  bodily  self,  a  bird ;  especially  it  is  breath  (nephesh, 
ruah,  anirrm,  spiritns,  psyche,  ihumos,  pneuma).  There  seems 
to  be  no  doubt  that  the  belief  in  the  dual  nature  of  the  self  arose 
from   a  consideration   of  the  phenomena   of  memory-images   in 


90  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

intimate  association  with  pleasurable  and  painful  feelings. 
Dreams  of  terror  and  delight,  day  visions  and  hallucinations  with 
strong  affective  coloring,  and  so  forth — in  such  states  men  saw  the 
forms  of  the  living  and  the  dead,  of  relatives  and  strangers,  of 
friends  and  enemies.  Thus  the  flux  of  the  conscious  life  appears 
more  intimate  and  variable,  freer  of  the  limitations  of  time  and 
space,  than  the  stubborn  and  fairly  stable  flow  of  the  external 
physical  processes.  Man's  ordinary  waking  memory-images,  too, 
were  recognized  as  largely  independent  of  the  external  world  in 
their  goings  and  comings.  The  realm  of  these  relatively  inde- 
pendent and  controllable  images  and  the  associated  affections 
becomes  the  soul  or  'psychical  self.  The  development  of  reason 
and  conscious  self-control  brings  about  a  belief  in  the  nonmaterial 
or  spiritual  character  of  the  soul.  The  subject's  own  body  is  then 
conceived  to  be  intermediate,  in  its  responsiveness  to  feeling  and 
purpose,  between  the  inner  purposive  procession  of  images  and 
affections  and  the  more  stubborn  external  world.  The  psychical 
self  is  regarded  as  the  inner  pulse  or  continuously  felt  process 
which  is  dominated  by  affections,  ideas,  interests  and  which  can 
feel  itself  as  such. 

The  self-awareness  of  the  qualitatively  unique  character  of  the 
I  inner  flux  is  the  condition  of  full  self-consciousness.  And,  the 
|  emergence  of  reflective  consciousness  or  self -consciousness  is  a 
unique  event,  the  expression  of  a  unique  principle.  The  distinc- 
tion between  the  realm  of  images  and  the  realm  of  external  bodily 
perceptions  is  a  stage  on  the  road  to  the  discovery  of  selfhood. 
Intercourse  with  other  selves  stimulates  the  discovery  of  self.  But 
these  conditions  do  not  account  for  the  manufacture  of  a  self  out 
of  purely  physical  materials.  Only  the  reality  of  selfhood  accounts 
fully  for  the  belief  in  one's  self  and  other  selves. 

The  validity  of  knowledge  cannot  be  accounted  for  on  any  other 
presuppositions  than  these:  (1)  that  the  mind  knows  some 
features  of  realities  immediately;  and  (2)  that  some  of  these 
known  realities  exist  independently  of  the  individual's  acts  of 
partially  knowing  them.  One  must  reject  the  argument  that, 
since  immediate  actuality  is  matter  of  conscious  experience,  there- 
fore one  can  have  no  knowledge  of  anything  but  facts  that  exist 
tn  some  consciousness.  If,  on  the  one  hand,  the  specific  nature 
of  the  experient  is  implicated  in  the  character  of  the  experienced 
object,  on  the  other  hand  it  is  an  assumption  without  warrant  to 


KNOWLEDGE  AND   REALITY  91 

say  that  the  nature  of  the  experienced  object  must  be  always  dis- 
torted by  becoming  object  of  experience.  Consciousness  may  be 
sometimes  pellucid. 

The  variations  in  sensory  experiences  among  different  ob- 
servers, in  regard  to  what  is  believed  to  be  the  same  object,  and 
the  variations  in  the  same  observer's  experiences  of  what  he 
believes  to  be  the  same  object,  in  different  times  and  situations 
and  through  the  avenues  of  different  senses,  render  absurd  the  as- 
sumption that  all  percepts  of  the  same  object  are  identical  in  qual- 
ity or  existence.  It  is  an  old  story  in  philosophy  that  the  varia- 
tions and  conflicts  among  sense  perceptions,  together  with  the  fact 
of  sensory  illusions,  require  the  separation  of  perception,  as  ap- 
pearance, from  the  real  objects.  If  the  being  of  things  consisted 
wholly  in  being  perceived,  there  would  be  as  many  distinct  things 
as  there  are  differing  percepts  for  all  actual  percipients.  Every 
individual  would  have  a  world  of  his  own.  At  every  successive 
moment  in  the  individual's  sensory  experiences  there  would  be 
a  ceaseless  succession,  an  endless  number,  of  differing  worlds. 
If  the  table  is  just  what  I  perceive  now  and  nothing  more,  then 
probably  precisely  the  same  table  does  not  exist  in  any  two  suc- 
cessive perceptions  of  mine,  and  the  number  of  successive  tables 
must  be  in  proportion  to  the  number  of  observers  multiplied  into 
the  number  of  their  percepts.  There  are  as  many  things  as  there 
are  distinct  percepts.  Things  are  annihilated  and  created  anew 
every  moment.16  What  then  is  the  one  really  "real"  table  ?  If  it 
be  a  wholly  unknown  entity,  we  are  impotent  to  define  its  relation 
to  our  perceptual  tables,  and  there  is  no  sense  in  calling  it  a  table. 
It  might  just  as  well  be  called  the  "real"  polar  bear.  The  absolute 
idealist  tells  us  that  the  "real"  table  is  the  content  of  an  all- 
knower's  all-inclusive  experience.  Perhaps  it  is!  Who  knows? 
But  since  we  are  given  no  information  as  to  the  relation  between 
the  multitude  of  perceptual  tables  and  the  absolute's  table,  we  are 
no  better  off  than  we  were  when  we  started.  Since  the  absolute 
includes  everything,  we  know  not  how,  it  explains  nothing.  We 
need  a  more  modest  principle  for  knowledge — one  that  does  not 
treat  us  with  high  disdain  and  that  we  can  use  in  the  day's  work. 

Any  part  of  the  empirical  environment,  of  which  a  self  must 
take  account  in  order  to  know  and  to  act,  is  a  real  object.     And 

"  Hume. 


92  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

the  same  principle  holds  good  for  the  individual  self's  own  nature 
or  character.  Any  part  of  its  inner  or  privately  experienced 
nature  of  which  the  self  must  take  account  in  order  to  carry  out  a 
purpose,  to  satisfy  an  interest,  is  real.  For  example,  the  young 
man,  setting  forth  upon  the  career  of  a  scholar,  must  take  account 
of  the  fact  that  he  cannot  help  falling  in  love.  He  may  find  that 
this  fact  and  its  consequences  are  "harder"  facts  than  the  table. 
Eeality  for  us  is  what  we  must  take  into  account  in  our  thinking 
and  acting,  and  for  the  satisfaction  of  our  interests. 

To  come  back  to  the  table,  the  "real"  table  is  a  logical  con- 
struction, an  entity  or  thing  necessarily  conceived  as  the  active 
center  or  bearer  of  manifold  possible  qualities  which,  in  perception 
and  action,  I  cannot  avoid  recognizing.  If  one  say  that  the  table 
is  simply  inert,  that  it  resists  and  sustains  certain  of  my  activities, 
I  remind  him  that  inertia  or  resistance  means  activity  counter  to 
another  being's  activity  (John  Locke  suggested  that  the  essence  of 
matter  is  passive  power,  but  he  failed  to  observe  that  passive  power 
is  a  concept  relative  to  another's  activities).  The  self,  both  as 
knower  and  agent,  is  a  member  of  a  complex  dynamic  environment, 
the  active  and  passive  relationships  of  whose  elements  are  subject 
to  continuous  change.  Differing  perceptions  are  held  to  refer  to 
what  is  existentially  the  same  object,  provided  there  be  sufficient 
continuity  and  coherence  in  the  experienced  qualities  and  their 
groupings  for  selves  to  act  on  and  suffer  or  perceive  the  object  in 
a  manner  that  is  continuous  and  coherent.  So  long  as  I  and  other 
selves  can  carry  out  similar  purposes  and  get  what  we  agree,  in 
terms  of  our  conventional  linguistic  symbols  and  pictures,  to  be 
continuously  similar  perceptual  reactions  we  believe  that  we  are 
dealing  with  the  same  table.  In  brief,  if  I  am  alone,  the  table  is 
the  same  object  for  me  so  long  as  I  can  do  similar  things  with  it 
and  suffer  similar  things  from  it.  If  you  are  with  me  and  we 
agree,  through  our  media  of  communication,  the  table  is  for  both 
of  us  the  same.  If  we  disagree  completely  then  either  you  are 
crazy  or  I  am,  and  some  other  selves  must  settle  the  matter. 

Sameness  of  objects  is  a  socially  useful  convention ;  a  standard- 
ized object  is  the  "real"  object.  Thus,  in  order  that  it  be  real  in  an 
intelligible  sense,  an  object  does  not  need  to  remain  absolutely  the 
same  through  a  lapse  of  time,  or  to  observers  in  different  situations 
and  conditions.  It  is  enough  if  there  be  recognizable  and  intelli- 
gible  continuity   and   coherence    in   the   qualities   s.nd   relations 


KNOWLEDGE  AND   REALITY  93 

experienced  and  logically  inferred  from  the  experiences.  A  real 
object  is  definable  as  anything  which  exercises  constraint  upon  us 
in  our  perception,  thinking,  and  willing;  and  which,  in  this 
capacity  has  some  degree  of  continuity,  empirical  coherence,  and 
social  cognizability.  Reality  as  a  whole  is  a  vastly  complex  system 
of  active  centers  of  qualities  in  relations  of  which  at  any  time  and 
under  any  circumstances,  we  perceive,  act  on,  or  are  conscious  of 
being  acted  upon  by,  only  a  fragment. 

The  objects  of  perception  then  do  not  exist,  just  as  they  are 
at  any  moment  perceived,  apart  from  the  act  of  perception.  No 
finite  object  is  self-complete.  No  perception  by  a  finite  subject 
can  be  self-complete.  Relations  are  as  real  as  qualities.  But,  as 
partial  apprehensions  of  the  actual  qualities  of  the  object  in  some 
of  its  relations  to  the  knower  and  to  other  qualities  of  the  environ- 
ment, perceptions  are  thus  far  valid.  The  perceptual  object  is  a 
true  aspect  of  the  real  object  in  dynamic  relation  to  a  percipient. 

There  is  empirical  continuity  between  objects  immediately 
perceived  and  others  related  to  them  in  the  context  of  reality. 
There  is  symbolical  continuity  between  representative  images  and 
concepts  of  objects  and  these  objects  as  immediately  sensed;  and 
there  is  logical  continuity  between  objects  experienced  and  other 
objects  whose  existence  is  implied  in  actual  experience,  but  which 
are  not  now  and  may  never  be  objects  of  any  finite  self's  experi- 
ence. For  example,  if  the  electron,  as  defined  in  the  electronic 
theory  of  matter,  is  the  assumption  in  regard  to  the  ultimate  con- 
stitution of  matter  which  best  agrees  with  all  the  facts  of  imme- 
diate experience  and  with  all  the  other  generalizations  and 
inferences  intermediate  between  the  perceptual  facts  and  the  con- 
ceptual nature  of  electrons,  then  the  belief  in  electrons  is  the 
valid  belief  in  regard  to  the  ultimate  constitution  of  matter.  If 
the  belief  in  the  existence  of  electrons  is  not  the  only  theory  of 
the  constitution  of  matter  which  is  a  logically  coherent  consequence 
of  the  empirical  character  of  physical  things,  then  the  existence  of 
electrons  remains  hypothetical.  By  contrast,  the  existence  of  the 
earth's  interior  or  of  the  other  side  of  the  moon  is  not  hypothetical 
in  this  sense.    No  other  belief  is  consistent  with  the  facts. 

Naive  realism  errs  in  assuming  the  complete  identity  of  the 
particular  object  with  the  content  of  a  single  perception,  and  in 
believing  that  particular  objects  are  cognized  as  such  in  isolation 
from  other  objects  and  without  consideration  of  the  percipient's 


94  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

own  individual  situation  and  constitution.  In  truth  we  never 
know  a  merely  isolated  particular  object.  Knowledge  of  anything, 
however  vague  and  rudimentary,  is  apprehension  of  a  specific 
datum  in  a  relational  complex.  Social  realism,  the  position  of  the 
writer,  admits  the  distinction  between  the  object  as  logical  con- 
struct, that  is  as  rational  and  public  ground  for  the  varying  per- 
ceptions which  refer  to  it,  and  the  percepts  as  series  of  aspects  of 
the  object;  and  holds  to  the  reality  of  nonexperienced  entities  as 
logically  implied  in  the  continuity  and  coherence  of  experience. 
It  holds  that  valid  knowledge  is  always  in  some  degree  a  matter 
of  the  determination  of  the  given  or  datum  of  sense  in  and  through 
its  position  and  connections  in  a  relational  complex.  It  insists  on 
the  logical  structure  of  reality  as  a  system  of  meaningful  elements 
in  a  totality. 

APPENDIX 

THE   NEW    CRITICAL   REALISM 

Since  I  have  called  the  doctrine  of  knowledge  expounded  in  this 
work  "Critical  Realism"  it  is  in  order  to  state  briefly  wherein  it  differs 
from  the  ingenious  and  original  doctrine  advocated  in  the  volume 
Critical  Realism  by  Durant  Drake  and  others.  There  are  several 
important  differences  between  the  standpoints  of  the  several  contribu- 
tors to  that  volume.  I  have  not  space  to  expound  or  examine  these 
differences.17  I  shall  limit  my  treatment  to  a  brief  discussion  of  the 
most  characteristic  features  of  the  doctrine,  especially  as  expounded 
by  Professors  Drake,  Santayana  and  Strong.  All  the  writers  seem 
to  be  agreed  in  distinguishing  three  factors  in  knowledge:  (1)  the 
mental  or  psychical  state;  (2)  the  meaning,  intent,  "character-com- 
plex" or  "essence,"  which  is  the  datum  or  "given";  (3)  the  real 
object  which  is  not  given,  but  affirmed  as  the  existent  which  the 
datum  or  essence  means,  and  in  genuine  knowledge  means  correctly. 
The  most  original  feature  of  the  general  doctrine  is  that  the  datum 
or  essence  is  always  a  universal,  a  what,  without  locus  in  space  or 
date  in  time.  The  mental  state  has  temporal  date  and  the  object 
in  perception  is  in  space,  since  an  existent  must  always  have  a  tem- 
poral, and  may  also  have  a  spatial  locus.  Messrs.  Drake,  Rogers, 
Santayana  and  Strong  deny  that  the  datum  is  a  mental  complex, 
whereas  Messrs.  Lovejoy,  Pratt  and  Sellars  affirm  that  the  datum  is 


"See  the  careful  review  of  the  work  by  Professor  E.  B.  Perry  in   The 
Philosophical  Review,  Vol.  xxx,  pp.  393-409. 


KNOWLEDGE  AND   REALITY  95 

the  "character"  of  the  mental  state  of  the  moment;  thus  for  the 
latter  the  datum  is  the  "essence"  both  of  the  object  known  through  it 
and  also  of  the  mental  state  which  is  the  "vehicle"  of  the  knowledge.  I 
am  unable,  on  grounds  given  elsewhere,  to  admit  the  reality  of  essences 
which  have  neither  mental  nor  physical  existence.  An  essence  or 
universal  is  cither  a  concept  existing  in  and  for  a  mind  or  it  is  a 
physical  relation;  it  may  be  both,  as  when  one  has  a  correct  concept 
of  a  physical  relation  or  "law";  it  may  be  mental  in  two  senses,  as 
when  a  mind  entertains  a  concept  of  value  or  purpose  which  actually 
functions  in  minds.  An  essence  which  is  neither  an  existing  thought 
nor  a  physical  law  seems  to  me  to  have  no  real  being,  either  in  the 
heavens  above,  the  earth  beneath  or  the  waters  under  the  earth.  It 
does  not  even  '  "  since  there  is  nothing  on  which  it  can  subsist, 

unless  one  invoke  a  Platonic  realm  of  ideas  (in  the  traditional  sense 

If  the  datum  is  the  "character"  of  the  mental  state  in  knowing 

:i  the  latter  is  identical  with  the  existent  known,  and  what  is 
known  is  a  mental  state;  we  are  not  delivered  from  mentalism. 
Surely  a  character  has  no  existence  except  as  the  character  of  some 
thing.  Either  the  object  known  is  mental  or  physical  or  a  neutral 
entity.  1  have  never,  to  the  best  of  my  knowledge  and  belief,  met 
a  neutral  entity.  Consequently  I  do  not  know  what  such  an  one 
ept  that  it  cannot  be  like  any  thing  that  I  have  ever 
known. 

Furthermore,  I  am  unable  to  understand  how  a  universal  ■ 
.'"  devoid  of  place  or  da1  attached  to  an  unperceived  object 

in  such  Fashion  that  through  it  the  latter  is  identified  as  owning  the 
universal  in  particularized  form,  here  and  now  or  there  and  then.  If 
the  essence  be  a  universal  which  does  not  exist  and  the  particular 
object  which  owns  it   (or,  perhaps,  is  owned  by  it)   is  not  in  any 

ped  immediately  perceived,  how  is  the  connection  effected  between 
them  ? 

In  the  case  of  my  knowledge  of  past  events,  or  of  objects  not  pres- 
to sense  but  believed  to  exist  now,  I  distinguish  between  the  mental 
state  which  is  a  momentary  existent  and  the  object  which  the  mental 

te  means  or  refers  to  indirectly;  but  my  affirmation  of  the  occur- 
rence of  past  events  or  of  the  contemporaneous  existence  of  objects 
not  perceived  is  an  inference  from  memory,  record  and  testimony. 
In  all  such  cases  knowledge  is  clearly  inferential  or  indirect;  and 
the  mental  state  of  knowing  is  representative  of  objects  not  given; 
what  is  given  is  the  feeling  of  familiarity  with  the  recognition  of 
nonpresence  to  perception  which  marks  the  memory  state,  or  belief 
in  the  trustworthiness  of  record  or  testimony.     The  critical  realist 


96  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

doctrine  transforms  the  mental  attitude  of  memory  or  interpretation 
of  credible  record  and  testimony  into  "essence."  He  inserts  the 
belief-attitude  as  a  tertium  quid  between  the  mental  state  and  the 
object  not  present.  In  the  case  of  perception  I  am  so  naive  as  to  be 
unable  to  find  the  three  factors  which  the  new  critical  realists  find. 
I  find  a  consciousness  of  my  mental  attitude  or  act  of  attention  and 
the  group  or  "congeries"  of  sensed  qualities  which  is,  for  me,  the 
object.  These  qualities  are  not  essences  or  universals  or  character- 
complexes  having  no  locus  in  space  and  time.  They  are  particular 
or  determinate,  here-and-now  existences.  They  occupy  a  given  spatial 
contour  at  this  moment.  I  am  aware,  on  reflecting,  that  I  do  not 
immediately  perceive  all  the  qualities  which  I  attribute  to  the  object, 
but  I  know  too  that  I  would  not  attribute  any  of  the  qualities  to  the 
object  if  I  were  not  in  the  immediate  presence  of  some  qualities  of 
sense.  I  cannot  help  regarding  these  qualities  as  having  a  non- 
mental  existence.  My  desk,  I  say,  is  green.  But  my  friend  says  that 
he  sees  it  gray.  What  is  its  real  color?  I  answer  that  to  him  it  is 
gray  and  to  me  green,  because  of  the  differences  in  the  structures 
of  our  respective  visual  apparatuses,  and  these  differences  are  con- 
stituent parts  of  the  real  world.  My  friend  and  I  do  not  see  the  desk 
as  having  the  same  color,  but  we  do  perceive  it  as  having  the  same 
identical  place,  contour  and  texture.  If  we  disagreed  in  regard  to 
all  these  items  we  would  not  see  the  same  desk  in  any  sense,  and  we 
could  not  even  disagree  in  regard  to  its  appearance.  There  must  be 
a  minimum  of  agreement  in  order  that  there  may  be  disagreement. 
For  common  sense  the  real  desk  is  the  desk  as  it  appears  to  the 
normal  percipient  under  normal,  that  is,  usual  conditions.  It  is 
the  community  of  perceptual  qualities  and  reactions  that  constitutes 
the  practical  test  of  realness.  The  objective  world  of  common  sense 
is  the  socially  accepted  series  of  aspects  or  appearances  of  the  physical 
order  to  normal  percipients.  In  one  sense  whatever  anybody  per- 
ceives in  an  object  is  real — namely  in  the  presence  of  that  individual 
percipient  with  the  sensory  and  mental  equipment  and  history  that 
is  his.  There  is  no  other  standard  that  is  final,  when  dispute  arises, 
than  the  agreement  or  community  established  through  communica- 
tion of  opinion  and  similarity  of  reaction  to  the  object.  The  doctrine 
of  essences,  given  but  not  existing,  distinct  from  but  affirmed  of  the 
object  seems  to  me  a  superfluous  fiction. 

What  then  is  the  object  in  the  absence  of  any  percipient?  It  is 
the  group  of  qualities  or  activities  which  in  the  presence  of  percipients 
give  rise  to  the  perceived  qualities.  I  understand  by  the  physical  in 
itself  just  that  complex  of  motions  of  physical  entities  which  are  in- 
ferred by  science  to  exist  as  the  nonmental  conditions  of  there  being 


KNOWLEDGE  AND   REALITY  97 

percepts.  In  this  sense  our  bodies  are  parts  of  the  physical  order. 
What  these  entities  are  science  is  continually  trying  to  determine.  It 
is  a  scientific  question.  Philosophy  is  concerned  with  it  chiefly  when 
the  physicist  turns  metaphysician  d  outrance  and  asserts  that  there 
are  no  percipient  minds  and  that  the  physical  conditions  of  percep- 
tion explain  away  the  percipient. 

Epistemological  idealism  or  mentalism,  a  better  term  since  ideal- 
ism also  means  the  doctrine  or  belief  that  the  universe  is  controlled 
by  ethical  or  spiritual  values,  a  doctrine  which,  as  will  appear  later, 
has  no  logical  connection  with  mentalism  or  even  with  pan-psyehism, 
has  been  subjected  to  many  criticisms  in  recent  philosophical  litera- 
ture. I  single  out  for  reference — G.  E.  Moore,  "Refutation  of  Ideal- 
ism/' Mind,  N.  S.  1903,  Vol.  xii,  pp.  433-453 ;  the  cooperative  volume, 
The  New  Realism,  especially  the  essay  by  R.  B.  Perry,  "A  Realistic 
Theory  of  Independence,"  and  the  volume  by  Perry,  Present  Philo- 
sophical Tendencies;  finally,  the  most  thoroughgoing  critical  exami- 
nation that  I  know  is  Oswald  Kuelpe's  Die  Rcalisierung,  Volume  I. 
Volume  II  of  the  latter  hits  just  appeared.  It  is  unnecessary  here 
to  review  all  the  criticisms.  I  shall  have  occasion  to  make  further 
criticisms  of  various  a  ntalism  in  connection  with  other 

problems.  Among  the  attempts  at  metaphysical  realism  may  be 
mentioned;  The  New  Realism,  The  New  Rationalism  by  E.  G.  Spauld- 
ing,  A  Study  in  Realism  by  John  Laird,  and  especially  the  monu- 
mental work  of  S.  Alexander,  Space,  Time  and  Deity.  The  present 
writer  has  reviewed  the  latter  work  in  The  Philosophical  Review, 
Vol.  xxx,  pp.  282-297. 


CHAPTER  VI 


APPEAKANCE  AND  REALITY 


The  only  materials  that  we  have  for  the  construction  of  a 
theory  of  reality  are  actual  experiences  plus  the  funded  meanings 
of  previous  experiences.  Experiential  reality  is  a  duality-in-unity, 
consisting  of  subjects  and  objects  of  experience.  And  the  feeling, 
thinking  and  willing  of  the  subject  are  just  as  truly  matter  of  experi- 
ence as  is  sense  perception.  Thus  to  attempt  to  construct  a  theory 
of  reality  and  to  leave  the  subject  out  of  consideration  is  like 
attempting  to  produce  the  play  of  Hamlet  with  the  Prince  of 
Denmark  left  out.  The  whole  business  of  metaphysics  is  just  to 
determine  in  outline  what  must  be  the  general  character  of  a 
coherent  world  order  as  implied  in  the  meanings  of  actual  experi- 
ence. The  total  concept  of  reality  must  include  features  that  go 
beyond  actual  experience,  but  that  are  implied  in  the  latter  as 
principles  for  interpreting  and  completing  it. 

Actual  experience  is  very  complex.  It  includes  things  and 
events  in  space-time  relations,  and  the  subject's  own  feelings, 
thoughts,  valuations,  purposes  and  efforts.  The  feelings,  thoughts, 
valuations  and  purposes  of  the  individual  subject  are  not  imme- 
diately accessible  to  direct  observation  by  other  subjects ;  therefore 
they  are  called  "subjective,"  but  they  are  indirectly  known  through 
the  behavior  of  their  subjects.  Objects  experienced  in  space-time 
relations  are  held  to  be  public  or  common  objects  perceivable  by 
other  knowers,  and  are  therefore  called  physical  objects.  Experi- 
ence is  always  in  process.  Subjective  states — feelings,  images, 
judgments,  valuations  and  purposes — change;  so  do  the  objects  of 
public  or  physical  experience.  Thus  the  consideration  of  all 
objects  of  experience  involves  temporal  relations.  It  is  not  so 
obvious  that  all  objects  of  private  and  individual  experience  in- 
volve spatial  relations,  although  I  think  that  ultimately  they  do. 
But.  the  discussion  of  the  latter  question  may  be  conveniently  post- 
poned to  a  later  stage  in  our  inquiry.     The  distinction  between 

98 


APPEARANCE  AND   REALITY  99 

physical  objects  and  psychical  objects  is  thus  equivalent  to  the 
distinction  between  things  perceived  as  having  publicly  accessible 
sensory  qualities ;  and  desires,  enjoyments,  sufferings,  images, 
concepts,  valuations  and  purposes,  as  contemplated  and  appre- 
ciated or  willed  by  the  individual  self.  The  minimal  meaning  of 
a  self  is  that  it  is  a  center  of  feeling,  thought  and  volition,  which 
can  be  aware  that  it  feels,  thinks,  values,  and  wills.1 

How  we  come  to  make  the  distinction  between  psychical  sub- 
jects or  selves  and  physical  objects  has  been  discussed  in  the 
previous  chapter.  We  saw  there  the  consciousness  of  being  a  self 
or  subject  of  experience  arises  through  a  gradual  process  of  dif- 
ferentiation between  menial  and  physical  objects  and  that  this 
process  takes  place  in  social  intercourse  with  other  selves  as  well 
as  in  the  individual's  direct  dealings  with  nature.  The  distinction 
between  the  mental  and  physical  is  built  up  through  the  demands 
made,  and  the  responses  received,  in  human  intercourse  with  other 
selves  and  nature.  The  physical  world  becomes  recognized  as  the 
common  and  more  or  less  constant  medium  of  human  intercourse. 
Self,  other  self  and  a  common  world  in  which  self  meets  its  other 
and  enjoys  with  and  suffers  from  the  other,  are  the  irreducible 
elements  in  man's  construction  of  a  universe.  Of  course,  if  an 
individual  insists  that  his  ego  is  the  cosmos  one  may  not  be  able 
to  convince  him  that  he  is  wrong,  but  one  may  properly  point 
out  that  to  thus  insist  on  the  identity  of  his  ego  with  the  cosmos 
is  to  perpetrate  at  once  a  tautology  and  a  contradiction.  For  in 
making  the  assertion  he  is  assuming  another  ego  to  make  it  to, 
Avhereas  the  assertion  itself  denies  the  existence  of  another  ego. 
If  he  persists  in  his  insistence  probably  he  will  finally  arrive  either 
in  the  mad  house  or  in  prison. 

The  development  of  experience  is  triadic.  The  increase  in 
content  and  organization  of  the  individual's  experience  is,  in  one 
aspect,  the  integration  of  his  personality,  in  wealth  and  harmony 
of  content  and  action ;  in  a  second  aspect,  the  corresponding  in- 


1  One  of  the  principal  motives  for  the  behavioristic  standpoint  in  psy- 
chology is  undoubtedly  the  desire  to  get  rid  of  the  elusiveness  and  privacy 
of  subjectivity,  and  thus  to  make  piychology  an  objective  science,  using  the 
common  physical  methods  of  observation,  experiment  and  measurement  that 
are  employed  in  the  physical  sciences.  Whether  in  so  doing  extreme  behavior- 
ism in  psychology  does  not  throw  out  the  baby  with  the  bath  we  need  not 
here  consider.  This  matter  will  be  discussed  more  fully  in  Book  iv,  "Per- 
sonality." 


100  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

tegration  of  his  social  relationships;  and,  in  a  third  aspect,  the 
integration  of  the  common  or  physical  world.  I  shall  now  con- 
sider the  grounds  on  which  a  sharp  contrast  is  set  up  between 
appearance  and  reality. 

If  all  actual  experiences  are  real  what  is  the  place  of  erroneous 
experiences  and  beliefs — of  illusions,  hallucinations  and  all  the 
errors  in  regard  to  fact  and  theory  that  one  finds  in  life  and  his- 
tory ?  If  experiences  are  real  does  it  not  follow  that  the  sun  moved 
around  the  earth  until  the  Copernicans  persuaded  some  Europeans 
to  believe  the  contrary  in  spite  of  appearances,  that  the  earth 
and  living  species  were  created  in  six  days  until  evolutionists 
succeeded  in  persuading  some  people  to  the  contrary  belief  ?  That 
things  are  not  really  as  they  seem,  that  experience  is  an  inconstant, 
inconsistent  and  deceptive  flux;  and  that  the  real  reality  must  be 
some  sort  of  ever-abiding,  harmonious  and  perfect  order  or  being 
behind  or  beyond  experience — this  is  a  discovery  which  seems  to 
be  the  very  threshold  of  wisdom.  The  contrast  between  the  muddy, 
tortuous  and  treacherous  stream  of  experience  and  the  clearness, 
fixity,  perfect  orderliness  and  reliability  of  the  true  reality  has 
been  a  main  motive  in  the  history  of  thought  from  the  Vedanta 
philosophy  of  India  and  the  philosophy  of  Parmenides,  the  Greek, 
down  to  the  present  time.  All  the  higher  religions  assume  the 
ultimate  reality  of  One  in  whom  is  neither  variableness  nor  shadow 
of  turning.  Even  those  philosophers  to-day  who,  like  Mr.  F.  H. 
Bradley  and  his  school,  insist  that  the  ultimate  reality  must  be  a 
perfect  experience,  argue  that  all  the  experiences  and  beliefs  of 
the  human  self  are  untrustworthy  appearances  because  incon- 
sistent, incomplete  and  in  flux.  Physical  things  and  their  quali- 
ties, space  and  time,  motion  and  change,  causation,  purposive 
activity,  and  even  the  self,  goodness  and  truth,  are  self-contra- 
dictory appearances.  No  one  of  these  things  can  stand  on  its  own 
feet ;  every  one  is  transitory,  forever  seeking  to  be  what  it  is  not 
and  what  it  cannot  become  without  passing  beyond  itself  and  being 
transmuted  into  something  other  than  it  is.  Every  one  of  these 
aspects  of  finite  experience  and  belief,  from  an  orange  and  its 
qualities  to  a  self  in  moral  volition  and  truth  seeking,  means  to 
be  what  it  is  not  and  never  is  what  it  means  to  be.  No  truth  is 
wholly  true,  except  the  truth  that  no  truth  is  wholly  true.  Every- 
thing in  our  experience,  every  category  of  ordinary  thinking,  every 
practical  idea,  runs  out  endlessly,  when  we  examine  it  analytically, 


APPEARANCE  AND   REALITY  101 

into  its  opposite  or  other.    We  can  neither  think  a  sensuous  thing 
as  the  unity  of  its  qualities  nor  as  different  from  its  qualities. 
Motion  and  change  are  inconsistent  because  there  must  be  some- 
thing which  moves  or  changes,  but  if  there  is  then  it  cannot  change 
or  move  without  ceasing  to  be  itself.    We  cannot  think  causality 
or   activity   without   at   once   asserting  that   causes   and   effects 
both   are   and   are   not   continuous.      Space   and   time   must   be 
affirmed  to  be  at  once  endlessly  divisible  and  extensible  and  to 
involve  absolute  bounds,  beginnings  and  endings.    The  self  is  ever 
fluctuating,  the  boundaries  between  self  and  not-self  are  ever  shift- 
ing, and  the  self  is  thus  forever  dependent  on  the  not-self.     Ideas 
and  ideals  refer  to  a  reality  other  than  themselves  and  if  they  were 
identical  with  it  they  would  cease  to  be  ideas  and  ideals.     The 
absolute  reality  must  be  a  perfect  individual  whole,  eternal,  utterly 
harmonious  with  itself,  the  perfect  union,  in  one  seamless  whole, 
of  meaning  and  existence,  a  coherent  and  stable  organization  in 
which  all  that  is  finite  and  transitory  is  absorbed  and  transmuted. 
It  must  be  beyond  all  the  experiences  that  human  beings  have  and 
yet  be  a  perfect  experience.     It  must  be  beyond  all  the  truth  that 
human  beings  can  find,  all  the  good  that  they  can  will  and  aspire 
to,  all  the  beauty  that  they  can  create  or  imagine.     All  human 
experience,  all  human  vision  of  truth,  beauty  and  goodness,  must 
pass  into  the  eternal  perfection  of  a  changelessly  complete  experi- 
ence.2   Each  of  the  appearances,  if  considered  as  a  whole  in  itself, 
is  more  or  less  contradictory.     Reality  is  a  perfect,  systematic 
whole,  an  eternally  harmonious  individual.     On  the  other  hand 
reality  is  present  in  all  the  appearances.     "Reality,  then,  being  a 
systematic  whole,  can  have  no  being  apart  from  its  appearance, 
though  neither  of  them  taken  singly,  nor  yet  the  sum  of  them 
thought  collectively,  can  exhaust  its  contents."  3    "And  though  no 
appearance  is  the  whole  of  reality,  in  none  of  them  all  does  the 
whole  of  reality  fail  to  manifest  itself  as  a  whole.    The  whole  is 
truly,  as  a  whole,  present  in  each  and  every  part,  while  yet  no 
part  is  the  whole."  4     The  appearances  differ  in  degrees  of  sys- 
tematic unity,  or  individuality,  and  the  degree  of  individuality 

1  The  best  brief  statement  of  the  arguments  for  the  above  view  is  per- 
haps that  of  Mr.  A.  E.  Taylor,  Elements  of  Metaphysics,  Book  ii,  Chaps.  1-3. 
The  whole  of  Mr.  Bradley's  Appearance  and  Reality  is  a  brilliant  piece  of 
argumentation  for  the  same  doctrine. 

*  Taylor,  Elements  of  Metaphysics,  p.  106. 

4  Ibid,  p.   106. 


102  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

which  any  appearance  possesses  is  the  measure  of  its  degree  of 
reality;  that  is,  of  the  degree  in  which  it  manifests  or  expresses 
the  character  of  the  whole.  The  whole,  as  perfect  system,  or  har- 
monious individuality,  is  present  in  every  part  but  not  equally  so. 
For  example,  a  constellation  of  electrons,  a  sentient  organism,  and 
a  well-organized  human  mind  freighted  with  thoughtful  experience 
and  insight,  all  have  some  degree  of  systematic  unity,  but  the 
human  mind  in  question  has  a  much  higher  degree  of  individuality 
than  the  constellation  of  electrons ;  and  therefore  is  a  much  more 
adequate  manifestation  of  reality,  that  is,  has  a  much  higher  degree 
of  reality.  But  all  appearances,  from  the  least  to  the  greatest,  are 
necessary  to  the  perfection  of  the  whole.  "In  the  sense  that  it  is 
the  same  single  experience  system  which  appears  as  a  whole  and  in 
its  whole  nature  in  every  one  of  the  subordinate  experience- 
systems,  they  are  all  alike  real,  and  each  is  as  indispensable  as 
every  other  to  the  existence  of  the  whole.  In  the  sense  that  the 
whole  is  more  exclusively  present  in  one  than  in  another,  there  is 
an  infinity  of  possible  degrees  of  reality  and  unreality."  5 

And  the  degree  of  individuality,  and  therefore,  the  degree  of 
reality,  which  any  appearance  has,  depends:  (1)  on  its  richness 
of  contents  or  its  comprehensiveness;  (2)  on  its  degree  of  internal 
unity  or  harmony.  These  two  features  of  individuality  or  reality 
are  complementary.  It  follows  that  we  are  nearer  the  final  truth 
in  regard  to  the  nature  of  the  perfect  individual  whole  of  reality 
when  we  think  of  it  as  an  organism  than  when  we  think  of  it  as  a 
mechanical  aggregate,  and  still  nearer  the  final  truth  when  we 
think  of  it  as  a  mind  than  when  we  think  of  it  as  an  organism. 
And,  if  a  society  be  a  more  comprehensive  and  better  organized 
individual  whole  than  a  mind,  then  we  would  be  nearest  the  final 
truth  about  reality  in  thinking  of  it  as  a  perfect  society.  On  the 
other  hand,  from  the  standpoint  of  what  we  may  call  Bradleyan 
idealism  the  perfect  reality  could  not  be  a  society  for  the  simple 
reason  that  a  society,  as  such,  has  not  and  is  not  a  single  experience. 

I  shall  now  examine  critically  Mr.  Bradley's  doctrine.  It  is 
obvious,  without  a  prolonged  dialectic,  that  if  any  finite  thing  be 
set  up  as  isolated  or  self-complete,  it  becomes  self-contradictory. 
Anything  finite  is  real  only  in  relation  to  others.  Everything 
finite  is  involved  in  a  complex  network  of  relationships.    My  pen- 


ibid.,  p.  109. 


APPEARANCE  AND   REALITY  103 

cil,  for  instance,  is  a  complex  of  sense  qualities — cylindrical  shape, 
yellow  color,  woody  texture,  specific  density,  diameter,  length,  and 
spatial  position.  Every  one  of  these  qualities,  and  therefore  all  of 
them  taken  together,  involve  series  of  relations  to  other  qualities, 
from  which  they  differ  and  which  they  resemble  in  various  degrees 
of  kind,  extensive  and  intensive  quantity,  cohesiveness,  density 
and  duration.  My  pencil,  also,  originates  and  passes  away  in 
teleological  and  social  series  of  relations.  It  is  quite  true  that  if 
we  set  up  space,  time,  causation,  activity,  purpose,  or  even  the 
self,  yes,  even  truth  or  goodness,  as  abstractions  existing  in  and 
for  themselves,  we  become  involved  in  self-contradictory  state- 
ments. The  human  self  is  complex,  changing,  in  part  dependent 
on  its  own  body,  on  other  selves,  and  on  physical  bodies  for  what 
it  is  and  becomes.  It  is  equally  true  that  truth  is  relational  in 
two  senses:  (1)  it  is  the  relation  between  a  knower  and  the  objects 
of  his  knowing;  (2)  no  single  object  of  knowledge  is  known  or 
knowable  in  isolation.  Goodness  is  relational  in  two  senses:  (1)  it 
is  the  relation  between  a  human  value  as  willed  and  the  objective 
conditions  of  successful  volition  (the  actual  nature  of  the  agent  is 
a  part  of  the  objective  conditions)  ;  (2)  no  single  willed  or 
accepted  value  exists  in  isolation.  Certainly,  then,  the  ultimately 
real  is  the  whole,  and  the  whole  must  be  some  sort  of  system. 
Whether  it  is  one  timelesslv  perfect  individual  or  harmonious 
experience  will  be  discussed  later.  Suffice  it  to  say  now  that  I  do 
not  so  regard  the  totality  of  the  real,  for  I  cannot  form  any  clear 
and  consistent  conception  of  reality  as  one  absolute  super-rela- 
tional, nontemporal  harmony  of  experience  not  owned  by  any  self ; 
and  if  there  be  a  perfect  self  it  must  exist  in  relation  to  other 
selves ;  therefore  it  cannot  be  the  totality  of  the  real.  Reality  at  its 
highest  level  may  be  a  society  of  selves,  but  it  cannot  be  one  self. 
Everything  real  must  be  part  of  the  total  universe  of  reality. 
Xo  finite  thing  or  event  exists  or  occurs  in  complete  isolation  or 
self-dependence.  The  doctrine  of  extreme  pluralism — that  reality 
consists  of  an  atomistic  chaos  of  independent  reals — scarcely  merits 
extended  refutation.  Whether  anything  can  exist  out  of  relation 
without  being  known  is  a  vain  question.  The  more  we  know  con- 
cerning the  behavior  of  things  in  our  world  the  clearer  it  becomes 
that  "all  things  in  one  another's  being  mingle."  The  "nature" 
of  anything  cannot  be  independent  of  its  relations.  Many  relations 
of  a  thing  may  be  conceived  that,  from  one  point  of  view,  or  for  one 


104  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

purpose,  are  practically  irrelevant  or  negligible,  but,  from  otter 
points  of  view,  are  relevant  and  important.  It  may  be  irrelevant 
to  me  whether  a  pupil  has  yellow  hair  or  wears  orange  neckties,  but 
if  I  were  his  haberdasher  or  his  beloved  these  considerations  might 
be  very  relevant.  The  assemblage  of  books,  furnishings,  writing 
materials,  sporting  tools,  etc.,  in  my  study  have  no  relevant  rela- 
tions from  the  point  of  view  of  a  logician  or  a  botanist,  but  from 
my  point  of  view  or  that  of  the  tax  assessor  their  relations  to  me 
or  to  one  another  are  quite  relevant.  Nothing  can  exist  absolutely 
out  of  relation  or  above  relation,  except  the  whole  universe;  but 
since,  by  definition,  the  universe  is  the  totality  of  related  beings, 
to  say  that  it  is  above  relations  is  only  to  repeat,  in  somewhat  mis- 
leading language,  the  definition  of  the  universe  as  the  systematic 
totality  of  related  entities. 

Why  should  we  argue  that  finite  things  which  are  partial 
aspects  of  experiential  reality  are  appearances  only,  because  they 
are  not  self-complete  and  self-existent  ?  Does  any  rational  being 
suppose  that  they  are?  If  taken  for  what  they  are,  finite  things 
are  real  though  no  one  of  them  is  absolute  nor  pretends  to  be.  I 
can  find  no  contradiction  between  an  entity  being  real  and  being  in 
relation.  Empirical  things  and  persons  are  not  swallowed  up  and 
made  to  disappear  when  they  are  recognized  to  exist  only  in  spe- 
cific relations.  It  seems  to  me  a  perverse  attitude  to  assert  that 
only  a  Spinozistic  substance,  as  absolutely  self-dependent  and  self- 
existent,  can  be  real.  An  absolute  that  climbs  up  the  ladder  of 
relations  and  then  pulls  the  ladder  up  into  its  superrelational  lair 
may  be  forever  secure  against  assault ;  but,  in  so  far  as  we  human 
beings  are  concerned,  it  is  unknowable,  and  we  can  hold  no  com- 
merce with  it.  If  all  relations  and  finite  experiences  and  attitudes 
are  transmuted  in  this  absolute,  how  can  all  the  flames  of  passion, 
chaste  and  carnal,  still  burn  undisturbed  in  it  ?  How  can  degrees 
of  reality  and  value  belong,  in  the  absolute,  to  finite  beings  and 
their  experiences ;  since,  so  long  as  these  latter  exist,  they  are  in 
relation,  and  are  thus  infected  with  contradiction  and  delusion; 
and,  when  they  are  considered  to  have  found  rest  in  the  absolute, 
they  have  lost  their  relational  character  and  thus  have  lost  all  that 
made  them  what  they  were?  How  can  the  absolute  be  absolute 
and  superrelational,  if  it  includes  and  lives  in  all  its  appearances  ? 
Logically  it  is  as  much  dependent  on  the  relational  and  transitory 
character  of  its  various  finite  fragments  as  the  latter  are  on  it, 


APPEARANCE  AND   REALITY  105 

The  relation  between  the  absolute  and  its  finite  parts  reminds  one 
strongly  of  the  economic  system  of  the  Scilly  islanders  who  are  said 
to  live  by  taking  in  one  another's  washing.  In  Mr.  Bradley's 
dialectics  all  empirical  qualities  and  relations  vanish  in  the  endless 
process  of  a  series  of  incompletable  relations,  which  absorbs  all 
empirical  distinctions  and  forever  chases  itself  across  the  stage  in 
the  vain  effort  to  swallow  its  own  tail. 

I  prefer  to  say  that  every  fragment  and  aspect  of  finite  experi- 
ence is  real  when  taken  in  its  right  relations.  I  admit  that  at  any 
moment  we  do  not  know  completely  the  relations  of  any  finite  and 
empirical  reality  ;  we  do  not  know  the  total  meaning  of  any  reality. 
But  what  we  have  we  have,  and  it  is  good  for  what  it  is  good  for 
and  as  far  as  it  will  go.  The  main  features  of  experiential  reality 
— space,  time,  causation,  activity,  novelty,  or  creative  synthesis 
producing  new  results,  effective  volition  based  on  valuation  and 
choice ;  and  therefore  both  physical  change  and  volitionally  initi- 
ated change,  the  organizing  activity  of  life  and  mental  selfhood  or 
personality — all  are  real  and  none  are  absolute. 

The  very  notion  of  reality  is  relative  to  both  our  experiences 
and  our  interests  or  purposes.  For  us,  the  absolute  reality  must 
be  either  that  which  enables  us  to  adjust  our  interests  to  our  ex- 
periences or  that  which  prevents  such  adjustment.  Thus  reality 
means  experience  interpreted  in  its  maximal  totality  and  integrity. 
If  all  human  experience  be  illusion,  there  is  no  point  in  calling  it 
illusion.  It  is  the  only  reality  we  have.  A  reality  which  did  not 
really  appear  in  our  experiences  would  be  both  useless  and  mean- 
ingless— a  non-entity. 

The  logical  and  psychological  grounds  for  the  distinction  be- 
tween appearances  and  reality  lie  in  the  so-called  errors  of  the 
senses  which  are  really  errors  of  judgment;  in  the  discrepancies 
between  our  beliefs  and  expectations  as  arising  out  of  our  judg- 
ments in  regard  to  past  experiences,  our  traditional  and  individual 
prejudices,  the  influence  of  other  persons  and  of  our  own  desires 
and  fears.  In  all  such  cases  what  we  do  is  to  put  an  actual  experi- 
ence in  the  wrong  context.  Everything  that  is  matter  of  experience 
is  real  in  so  far  as  it  is  taken  for  what  it  is,  that  is,  taken  in  its 
right  relations  to  other  items  of  experience.6     Everything  sub- 


•  The  pan-objectivism  of  the  neo-realist  is  based  on  exaggeration  of  this 
point. 


106  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

jective  is  of  course  real  as  matter  of  experience.  Illusion  and 
hallucination  consist  in  putting  experience  in  the  wrong  con- 
text. If,  for  example,  I  assert  that  there  are  spots  on  an  immac- 
ulate table  cover,  whereas  the  spots  are  in  my  eye,  the  spots  in 
my  eye  are  alarmingly  real.  My  error  was  in  placing  these  spots 
in  wrong  relations  in  the  systems  of  experience.  Everything  real 
is  determinate.  The  determinate  character  of  every  real  entity  is 
determined  by  its  own  nature  in  relation  to  the  natures  of  other 
entities.  Nothing  exists  out  of  relation.  The  whole  of  reality  is 
the  totality  of  determinate  beings  in  relations. 

There  are  many  varying  degrees  of  individuality  in  things — 
from  grains  of  sand  and  pebbles  through  crystals  and  the  whole 
scale  of  living  beings  to  the  highest  type  of  human  personality. 
The  existence  of  an  ascending  series  of  individualities  is  the  basis 
of  the  doctrine  that  there  are  degrees  of  reality.7  It  is  said  that 
the  self,  although  inconsistent,  possesses  a  higher  degree  of  reality 
than  anything  which  is  not  a  self.  Goodness  and  truth  are  incon- 
sistent appearances,  but  they  possess  higher  degrees  of  reality,  that 
is,  have  more  of  individuality  and  harmony,  than  do  evil  and  error. 
The  absolute  is  the  perfect  individual  whole,  and  hence  it  mani- 
fests itself  in  some  appearances  more  fully  than  in  others — in  a 
well-organized  human  person  more  fully  than  in  a  rat,  in  the  social 
moral  order  of  a  highly  civilized  culture  more  fully  than  in  that 
of  a  tribe  of  savages,  etc.  The  measure  of  the  degree  in  which  any 
appearance  manifests  the  absolute  is  the  degree  of  its  individu- 
ality. 

The  logical  basis  of  the  doctrine  that  the  degree  of  individuality 
coincides  with  the  degree  of  reality  is  the  assumption  that  indi- 
viduality, the  supreme  standard  of  value,  is  the  final  criterion  of 
reality ;  in  short,  that  the  idea  of  value  or  perfection  is  the  key  to 
the  nature  of  reality.8  Now,  no  doubt  the  assumption  that  the 
standard  of  value  is  the  standard  of  ultimate  reality,  that  the  being 
of  highest  value  must  be  most  real,  is  one  that  the  philosopher 
inevitably  makes.9  If  there  be  an  ultimate  unity  of  all  other 
values — harmonious    individuality,    eternally    perfect    whole    of 


7  Cf.  Bradley,  Appearance  and  Beality;  and  Bosanquet,  The  Principle  of 
Individuality    and    Value,   passim. 

8  This  is  the  newest  form  of  the  ontological  argument. 

•Every  great  philosopher  from  Plato   down  to  Royce  has  made   this  as- 
sumption. 


APPEARANCE  AND   REALITY  107 

meaning,  in  which  all  lesser  values  are  integrated — it  will  be  the 
most  weighty  and  consequential  problem  that  a  philosopher  can 
engage  upon  to  consider  whether  this  ideal  unity  of  all  values  be 
also  the  supremely  existent  or  reality.  But  there  are  two  distinct 
questions  here:  (1)  What  is  the  logical  or  metaphysical  structure 
of  reality?  (2)  "What  are  the  values  of  the  various  forms  or 
structures  of  existence?  More  briefly:  what  are  the  general 
features  of  reality,  and  what  values  has  reality  as  a  whole  ?  The 
principal  of  harmonious  individuality  may  be  the  highest  criterion 
of  value.  It  may  be  the  case  that  the  most  comprehensive  and 
stable  organization  of  content  is  exemplified  in  mind  and  specif- 
ically in  socialized  mind  or  personality.  It  may  be  that  social  indi- 
viduality or  personality  is  the  ultimate  criterion,  source  and 
sustainer  of  the  intrinsic  values  of  existence.  Indeed,  I  hold  that 
this  is  so  ;  but  it  seems  to  me  to  be  introducing  confusion  of  thought 
at  the  beginning  of  metaphysical  inquiry,  and  in  fact  to  be  a  beg- 
ging of  the  question,  to  assume  that  the  final  criterion  of  value  is 
the  only  criterion  of  reality.  We  may  have  the  right  to  believe 
that  only  harmoniously  organized  individuality  rich  in  content  is 
enduringly  real.  The  most  valuable  realities  may  be  the  most  per- 
manent, but  I  do  not  think  we  have  the  right  to  assume  that  the 
discordant  or  impermanent  or  changing  are  unreal.  Everything  is 
real  in  so  far  as  it  is  taken  for  what  it  is.  The  whole  of  reality 
now  is  no  more  real  than  any  one  of  its  parts,  for  every  part  is 
just  as  necessary  to  the  whole  as  the  whole  is  to  it.  If  any  part, 
however  insignificant,  and  ephemeral,  become  nonexistent  the 
character  of  the  whole  is  thereby  altered.  What  right  have  we  then 
to  say  that  the  whole  is  eternally  the  same  although  its  parts  are 
transitory  appearances?  Before  we  can  apply  our  criterion  of 
value  to  the  nature  of  reality  as  a  whole  we  must  by  logical  analysis 
determine  the  general  structure  of  empirical  reality. 

That  reality  must  honor  or  sustain  the  fundamental  meanings 
and  values  that  are  discovered,  wrought  out  and  interwoven  in  the 
texture  of  human  experience  is  the  basic  postulate  of  knowledge 
and  intelligent  action.  Reality  must  be  shot  through  with  and  con- 
trolled by  the  values,  theoretical,  ethical,  aft'ectional,  and  {esthetic, 
which  man  progressively  discovers  and  realizes,  in  his  manifold 
relations  in  the  world  totality;  in  which  he  is  an  interpreting, 
organizing,  and,  in  some  small  measure  at  least,  a  creative  factor. 
The  fundamental  forms  of  human  self-activity,  of  which  thought, 


108  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

action  and  feeling  are  distinguishable  but  not  separable  aspects,  are 
phases  of  the  self-fulfillment  of  conscious  life  through  the  growth 
in  selves  of  reflective  intercourse  with  the  world  which  may  be 
called,  indifferently,  dynamic  thinking  or  intelligent  action. 
Knowledge  is,  though  not  in  any  narrowly  utilitarian  sense,  a 
scheme  or  plan  of  action,  by  which  selves  can  come  into  richer, 
more  harmonious  and  durable  relations  with  the  whole  of  reality  in 
which  they  are  consciously  dynamic  elements;  and,  through  so 
coming,  can  enrich,  harmonize  and  conserve  the  life  of  conscious 
individuality. 

Eoyce  argued  that  ideas  are  always  plans  of  action,  that  every 
idea  demands  its  own  fulfillment;  and  Dewey  has  insisted  that 
thought's  function  is  to  serve  as  an  instrument  of  better  adjust- 
ment to  the  environment  and  of  satisfaction  of  the  self's  interests. 
If  the  latter  term  be  taken  in  a  sufficiently  broad  and  inclusive 
sense  we  can  accept  it.  The  function  of  thought,  the  function  of 
even  the  most  abstract  universals,  such  as  mathematical  concepts 
and  philosophical  categories,  as  well  as  of  the  most  elemental 
meanings  of  experienced  objects,  such  as  food  and  warmth,  is  to 
enable  the  self  to  enrich,  harmonize  and  preserve  its  own  being,  to 
enlarge,  deepen  and  perpetuate  the  values  of  experience  by  finding 
and  living  in  the  right  relations  to  its  physical  and  social  environ- 
ment. Only  I  would  insist  that  an  essential  part  of  the  higher  life 
of  selfhood  consists  in  those  experiences  which  we  call  aesthetic 
enjoyment,  philosophical  speculation  and  contemplation,  and  re- 
ligious devotion,  as  well  as  in  communion  with  one's  fellows  in 
friendship  and  love.  For,  as  we  shall  see  more  fully,  in  later 
chapters,  the  self  lives  most  deeply,  not  in  narrowly  practical 
activities  but  in  these  experiences  which  bring  it  into  union  with 
other  selves  and  with  the  universe. 

Thus  knowledge  or  truth  is  dynamic.  All  meanings,  uni- 
versals, wrought  out  in  the  process  of  thinking,  are  plans  of  conduct 
in  the  broad  sense.  Their  function  is  to  guide  and  lead  the  self, 
which  has  fashioned  them  to  this  end,  into  deeper,  richer  and  more 
enduring  experiential  relations  with  the  rest  of  reality.  The  self 
which  seeks  realization  is  a  conscious  dynamic  center  in  a  dynamic 
universe.  And,  of  course,  as  we  shall  see  more  fully  in  the  sequel, 
the  cognitive  and  rational  self  develops  and  lives  in  social  relations. 
Knowledge  is  the  product  and  the  instrument  of  socialized  selfhood 
or  personality;  through  it  personality  enhances  its  own  life  in  a 


APPEARANCE  AND  REALITY  109 

universe  in  which  it  is  an  immanent  center,  a  partial  creator  and 
sustainer  of  experience.  Through  the  maintenance,  enrichment 
and  harmonization  of  personality  alone  does  the  universe  acquire 
meaning.  In  knowledge,  thought  and  the  self  who  thinks  do  not 
transcend  themselves  or  remain  shut  up  within  their  own  skin ;  for 
the  self  who  thinks  is  always  a  dynamic  center  in  the  world,  a  focus 
of  cosmic  forces;  and  knowledge  is  nothing  else  than  the  unique, 
because  reflective,  creative  and  universalizing,  process  or  activity 
by  which  selves  hold  successful  converse  with  the  rest  of  reality. 


CHAPTER  VII 


ERROR 


In  the  present  chapter  I  shall  discuss  the  problem  of  error  in 
its  metaphysical  bearings. 

The  psychology  of  error  is  a  very  important  subject,  but  to  deal 
with  it  in  detail  would  take  considerable  space  and  might  divert  us 
from  our  main  purpose. 

The  self  lives  in  and  through  opposition,  or  what  the  Hegelian 
would  call  "negativity."  The  oppositions  of  life  are  contra- 
positives,  or  counter  affirmations,  not  bare  negations  of  affirmative 
positions.  In  the  moral  life  the  bad  is  not  the  mere  absence  of 
the  good.  There  could  be  no  moral  life  without  the  conflict  of 
positive  opposites.  The  good  is  often  the  enemy  of  the  best.  In 
aesthetic  experience  beauty  lives  by  contrast  with  ugliness ;  and 
ugliness  is  not  the  mere  absence  of  beauty,  as  common  speech 
shows  in  its  distinctions  between  beauty,  plainness  and  ugliness. 
In  the  affectional  life  "sorrow's  crown  of  sorrows  is  remembering 
happier  things" ;  and  happiness's  crown  of  happiness  includes  the 
memory  of  old  unhappy  far-off  things.  Similarly  it  is  in  the 
intellectual  life.  Truth  is  attained  in  conflict  with  error,  and 
not  merely  by  overcoming  ignorance.  It  is  often  said  that  error 
is  truth  in  the  making.  There  is  a  soul  of  truth  in  propositions 
erroneous,  and  a  soul  of  error  in  propositions  true.  But  we  must 
distinguish  between  mere  ignorance  and  positive  error,  else  we 
shall  make  shipwreck  on  the  paradox,  which  Plato  brings  out  in 
the  Theaetetus  and  elsewhere — how  can  one  think  that  which  is 
not?  If  I  am  ignorant  and  am  conscious  that  I  am  ignorant  I 
commit  no  error.  I  err  only  when  I  believe  and  affirm  a  propo- 
sition in  the  absence  of  adequate  empirical  and  rational  grounds. 
Judgment  involves  belief  and  belief  is  the  voluntary  affirmation 
of  a  proposition,  or  of  a  complex  of  propositions.  What  one 
affirms  to  be  true  involves  at  least  the  volitional  act  of  acknowl- 
edgment or  acquiescence.  It  frequently  involves  the  more  active 
attitude  of  asserting  or  proponing  judgments.     Thus  one  cannot 

110 


ERROR  111 

be  said  to  know  or  to  claim  truth  who  has  not  at  least  rethought 
and  relived  judgments  into  his  own  mental  texture.  Plato's  dis- 
tinction between  having  truth  and  possessing  it  is  relevant  here. 
Truth  is  appropriated,  no  less  than  found,  through  personal  ac- 
tivity. Knowing  is,  in  logical  terms,  the  judgmental  activity  by 
which  a  thinker  affirms  that  a  specific  apprehended  content  of 
meaning  holds  good  of  reality.  A  belief  is  a  judgment,  that  is, 
a  proposition  made  or  accepted  by  the  will  as  intellectual  act. 

The  acquisition  of  truth  through  the  activity  of  the  self,  and 
the  intellectual  development  of  the  self  through  the  acquisition 
of  truth  involve  error;  since  it  is  only  by  overcoming  error  that 
one  achieves  truth.  We  cannot  understand  what  a  finite  knower 
would  be  like  without  the  possibility  of  error,  any  more  than  we 
can  understand  what  a  finite  moral  agent  would  be  like  without 
the  possibility  of  sin. 

Ignorance,  I  have  said,  Is  not  in  itself  error,  but  one  may  err 
through  ignorance;  in  other  words,  if  one  is  ignorant  of,  or 
ignores,  hi.-  own  ignorance,  and  makes  an  affirmation  he  errs.  One 
may  err  through  failure  to  define  clearly  and  distinctly  what  it  is 
that  one  seeks  to  know.  For  example,  I  may  err  in  a  scientific 
investigation  because  I  am  ignorant  of  my  ignorance  of  the  pres- 
ence of  certain  disturbing  causes.  1  may  err  because  I  am  igno- 
rant of  certain  defects  in  my  sense  organs  or  in  my  logical  pro- 
cesses of  analysis  and  inference.  In  practical  affairs  one  may  err 
through  ignorance  of  one's  own  powers,  deficiencies  or  motives, 
or  through  ignorance  of  other  men  in  the  same  respects.  One 
may  err  through  prejudices,  inherited  from  tradition  or  acquired 
through  social  suggestion,  or  through  one's  own  predilections. 
One  may  err  through  impatience  and  haste,  due  to  desire,  hope, 
fear  or  dogmatic  self-assertiveness.  If  the  mind  received  knowl- 
edge by  passively  reflecting  the  actual  world,  if  truth  were  a 
mirrorlike  reproduction  or  copying  of  reality,  as  representation- 
ism  assumes,  the  possibility  and  fact  of  error  would  be  unaccount- 
able. On  the  copy  theory  of  truth  error  would  be  meaningless. 
The  mind  would  keep  step  with  the  world  and  there  would  be  no 
contrast  possible  between  truth  and  error.  Thus  the  fact  of  error 
refutes  pure  empiricism  or  sensationalism.  It  is  because  the  self 
develops  its  mental  life  in  dynamic  intercourse  with  the  world 
that  error  is  possible.  Judging  is  reflective  willing,  or  the  activity 
of  the  individual  intellect. 


112  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

Error,  in  distinction  from  the  mere  absence  of  knowledge,  is 
due  either  to  emotional  perturbations  of  the  intellect  or  to  the 
influence  of  unthinking  habits  of  acquiescence,  the  result  of  man's 
tendency  to  accept,  through  social  suggestion,  prevailing  habits  of 
belief.  Descartes  was  right,  in  part,  at  least  in  attributing  error 
to  the  influence  of  the  will,  in  the  sense  of  the  emotional  and 
impulsive  tendency  in  man  to  over-hasty  judgment  and  absence 
of  critical  discrimination.  As  Hume  wisely  said,  belief  is  more 
properly  the  offspring  of  the  sensitive  than  of  the  intellectual  part 
of  our  nature.  Of  course  one  may  err  from  involuntary  ignorance. 
There  is  doubtless  such  a  thing  as  invincible  ignorance  of  one's  own 
ignorance.  There  is,  however,  also  voluntary  ignorance;  igno- 
rance due  to  the  unwillingness  of  the  individual  to  repress  the 
emotional  solicitations  to  belief  or  to  resist  the  pressure  of  social 
suggestion. 

Thus  error,  in  the  full  sense,  is  a  denial  of  the  will  to  know,  a 
refusal  to  will  the  whole  truth.  Obedience  to  the  will  to  know 
carries  with  it  the  duty  to  doubt,  to  suspend  judgment  and  repress 
the  impulse  to  believe  and  assert.  In  the  ethics  of  thought  it  is  a 
paramount  obligation  to  cultivate  the  consciousness  of  ignorance, 
to  be  skeptical  and  critical  of  particular  propositions  that  clamor 
for  belief.  One  has  heard  much  of  the  will  to  believe.  For  a 
rational  being  the  will  to  disbelieve,  the  duty  to  doubt,  constitutes 
a  greater  obligation  than  the  will  to  believe.  In  so  far  as  one  is 
conscious  of  one's  ignorance  and  fallibility  the  sting  of  ignorance 
is  drawn;  the  mind  is  transmuting  ignorance  into  knowledge  in 
the  very  process  of  doubting  its  own  prejudices  and  prepossessions ; 
for  the  greatest  obstacle  to  the  growth  and  spread  of  truth  probably 
does  not  lie  in  unavoidable  ignorance  nor  in  mental  impotence.  It 
lies  chiefly,  rather,  in  mental  inertia,  in  unwillingness  to  bear  the 
pangs  of  doubt,  and  to  undergo  the  labor  of  that  critical  and 
skeptical  quest  without  which  truth  is  not  gained  or  possessed. 
Man  will  not  will  the  whole  truth  because  he  is  emotionallv  incited 
to  accept  specific  propositions  at  their  face  value.  To  save  himself 
the  labor  of  rigorous  analysis  and  the  pain  of  resisting  his  appetites 
and  desires,  his  hopes  and  fears,  to  gain  time  and  energy  for  the 
satisfaction  of  desires  other  than  that  of  clear  and  coherent  think- 
ing, man  refuses  to  continue  the  enterprise  of  thinking ;  that  is,  of 
suspense  of  belief,  rigorous  analysis  and  the  weighing  of  alter- 
native possibilities. 


ERROR  113 

Thus  the  assertion  that  one  has  the  whole  truth  is  the  denial 
of  the  coherence  of  truth  and  experience.  This  denial  has  often 
brought  direful  consequences.  For  example,  when  the  Inquisition 
persecuted  Galileo  in  order  to  maintain  what  proved  to  be  an 
erroneous  cosmology,  when  Calvin  caused  Servetus  to  be  burned, 
and  in  countless  similar  instances,  the  errors  committed  consisted 
in  the  affirmation  of  misinterpreted  systems  containing  partial 
truths  as  the  whole  truth.  The  willful  assertion  of  a  partial  truth 
as  a  whole  truth  or  of  a  belief  as  final,  in  the  face  of  its  incom- 
patibility with  observed  facts  and  logical  deductions  therefrom, 
constitutes  radical  error — the  sin  against  the  spirit  of  truth.  In 
the  face  of  man's  intellectual  history  it  cannot  be  denied  that  there 
is  a  voluntary  error  which  arises  from  the  violation  of  that  ethical 
obligation  to  will  the  whole  truth,  of  which  the  duty  to  doubt 
specific  propositions  is  the  converse.  The  intrinsic  value  of  truth 
is  a  form  of  the  intrinsic  ethical  value  of  rational  selfhood.  The 
true  is  by  no  means  always  the  most  obvious  or  pleasantest  or  most 
profitable  in  speedy  returns.  The  search  for  truth  demands  self- 
di-cipline  and  self-abnegation,  qualities  rarer  in  institutions  and 
parties  than  even  in  individuals.  Here  as  elsewhere,  in  the 
spiritual  life,  he  that  6eeketh  his  life  shall  lose  it,  and  he  that 
loseth  his  life  shall  find  it.  The  recognition  of  the  intrinsic  worth 
of  truth  as  a  living  system,  into  which  the  individual  must  pene- 
trate by  personal  activity,  and  to  which  he  owe3  absolute  allegiance 
at  the  cost  of  abandoning  his  most  cherished  prejudices  and  pas- 
sions, is  the  intuition  of  a  universal  spiritual  quality  in  the  self. 
The  recognition  of  the  impersonal  and  absolute  value  of  truth 
impels  the  self  to  seek  actively  the  maximal  comprehensiveness  and 
harmony  or  coherence  in  experience  and  in  its  reflective  interpreta- 
tion. Coherence  in  our  beliefs  is  not  subservient  to  any  ulterior 
end.  Reflective  thinking  presupposes  the  coherent  meaningfulness 
of  reality;  in  knowing,  the  self  seeks  to  make  reality  its  conscious 
possession,  or  vice  versa,  to  remake  itself  into  a  center  of  signifi- 
cant awareness  of  reality.  Truth  means  the  reflective  organization 
of  experience,  under  the  guidance  of  the  ideal  of  a  harmonious 
intuition  or  coherent  system  of  meanings,  which  is  the  apprehen- 
sion of  reality  as  an  intelligible  whole  or  cosmos.  The  particular 
facts  in  nature,  history,  the  social  order,  or  the  individual  life, 
get  their  meanings  through  their  universalizing  connections  in 
the  organic  totality  of  experience.     Thus  no  isolated  dafcun  is 


114  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

true.  There  are  no  absolutely  atomic  facts.  In  this  sense  there  are 
degrees  of  truth — degrees  of  approximation  to  the  ideal  of  a  com- 
pletely articulated  system  of  meanings  in  which  the  individual 
thinker  transcends  his  private  and  particular  existence  and  holds 
converse  with  the  nature  of  the  world.  That  the  real  universe  is, 
at  least  in  posse,  a  coherent  or  intelligible  whole  is  the  fundamental 
postulate  of  thought.  Thus  knowledge  moves  on  from  stage  to 
stage  in  the  unity  of  reflective  life,  in  so  far  as  it  contributes  to 
the  enrichment  of  the  intuition  of  reality  as  a  harmonious  whole 
of  individual  elements. 

Emerging  first  in  the  urgent  pressure  of  vital  needs  and  appe- 
tites, the  life  of  reflective  thinking  acquires,  in  the  course  of  social 
evolution  and  individual  development,  an  intrinsic  value  in  propor- 
tion as  selves  take  on  a  more  reflective  and  rational  character. 
Reflective  thinking  remains  always  a  function  of  personal  life. 
Truth  enriches  and  harmonizes  personality.  But,  in  the  growth 
of  reflection,  thought  ceases  to  be  merely  an  instrument  for  reach- 
ing extrinsic  ends.  Thought  becomes  an  integral  function  of  the 
self,  enriching  the  contents  and  transforming  the  quality  of  life 
itself.  No  longer  merely  a  means  to  ulterior  ends,  reflective 
thinking  becomes  a  part  of  the  supreme  end — the  fulfillment  of 
personality. 

The  study  of  early  mythologies  and  cosmogonies  indicates  that 
disinterested  curiosity  and  delight  in  the  free  play  of  productive 
imagination  and  reasoning  must  have  appeared  quite  early  in  the 
history  of  the  race.  But  the  successful  development  of  free  mental 
activity  was  not  possible  without  a  considerable  degree  of  practical 
control  over  nature.  Man  must  first  be  liberated  from  the  urgent 
pressure  of  hunger,  physical  discomfort  and  sex  appetite  and  from 
debasing  fears  before  he  can  do  much  disinterested  thinking.  It 
is  the  employment  of  knowledge  as  an  instrument  of  practical 
utility  which  removes  the  hindrances  in  the  way  of  the  free  and 
disinterested  activity  of  thought.  In  this  respect  the  development 
of  knowledge  is  analogous  to  the  development  of  art,  which  has 
likewise  passed  from  being  a  tribal  utility  to  being  an  intrinsic 
form  of  personal  value. 

I  have  said  that  all  activity  of  thought,  over  and  above  that 
which  is  impelled  by  the  pressure  of  practical  needs,  arises  from 
a  sense  of  the  intrinsic  value  of  truth  for  the  development  of  per- 
sonality by  intellectual  union  with  the  universe  of  reality.     Thus 


ERROR  115 

truth,  as  a  form  of  intrinsic  value,  means  the  realization  of  spir- 
itual personality  through  contemplation  of  the  universe — the  intel- 
lectual love  of  God.  He  in  whom  the  desire  for  this  contemplative 
union  with  the  nature  of  things  has  not  been  awakened  is  not  yet 
a  full  personality.  In  the  urge  to  know  the  truth  for  its  own  sake 
man  stands  in  the  presence  of  an  ultimate  spiritual  quality.  On 
the  other  hand,  truth  does  not  exist  for  him  who  feels  no  obligation 
to  seek  it  for  its  own  sake;  just  as  the  good  or  the  beautiful  do  not 
exist  for  those  who  feel  no  desire  to  seek  them  for  their  own  sakes. 
Truth,  goodness  and  beauty  are  their  own  excuses  for  being. 


CHAPTEK  VIII 

THE  FINAL  GROUND  OF  KNOWLEDGE1 

It  may  be  well  to  summarize  our  main  conclusions  thus  far. 
Thinking  is  not  a  mirror  which  passively  reflects  a  world  outside ; 
valid  thoughts  are  not  copies  of  things.  Thought  is  active  in 
knowing,  no  less  than  in  willing.  It  is  obviously  the  case  that 
the  individual  mind  in  knowing  does  not  create  the  materials  of 
knowledge,  not  even  of  its  own  self-knowledge.  There  are  always 
determinate  data  for  thought  given  through  immediate  experience. 
On  the  other  hand,  it  is  a  fruitless  endeavor  to  attempt  to  define 
the  original  data  of  experience  in  terms  of  a  so-called  pure  experi- 
ence or  an  absolute  sensible  minimum  of  experience.  Sense  data  or 
sensa,  as  Mr.  S.  Alexander  calls  them,  are  thought  data;  for  per- 
ception is  implicit  or  incipient  judgment.  We  can  draw  no  line, 
on  one  side  of  which  are  the  sensa  and  on  the  other  side  are 
judgments.  Pure  sensations  are  artificial  products  of  analysis. 
There  is  no  such  thing  as  "pure"  experience.  It  is  an  abstraction. 
Actual  experience,  in  its  crudest  terms,  is  the  reaction  of  mind  to 
stimuli,  but  the  most  immediate  datum  is  the  experience  as  re- 
ceived and  categorized  by  mind.  The  stimulus  is  an  inferential 
or  logical  construct.  Even  electrons  or  ether  have  meaning  only  as 
organically  related  to  minds  perceiving  movements,  stresses  and 
strains,  attractions  and  repulsions,  colors,  etc. 

The  cognitive  value  of  the  entire  realm  of  the  unconscious  or 
not-self  depends  on  the  readiness  with  which  the  most  immediate 
experiences,  as  meeting  points  of  self  and  not-self,  lend  themselves 
to  interpretation  and  reconstruction  in  terms  of  the  self's  control- 
ling interests  and  categories.  (I  have  said  "unconscious  or  not- 
self"  because,  in  so  far  as  a  self  may  know  itself,  what  it  knows  is 
not  itself  as  knowing.  I  leave  in  abeyance  for  the  present  the 
question  whether,  and  how,  a  self  may  know  itself.)     While  the 

1  This  chapter  is  the  revision  of  an  article  under  the  same  title  which 
appeared  in  The  Philosophical  Bevietv,  Vol.  xvii.,  No.  4,  July,  1908,  pp.  383-399. 

116 


THE  FINAL  GROUND  OF  KNOWLEDGE  117 

external  world  has  a  determinate  and  independent  order,  this  order 
is  found  not  to  exclude  the  interpretative  influence  of  thought  and 
the  directive  influence  of  purpose.  The  self  is  able  to  know  to 
some  extent  the  order  of  nature  and  to  adjust  its  own  activities 
thereto.  The  most  obvious  test  of  knowledge  is  that,  taken  by  and 
large,  it  works.  Moreover,  the  external  world  does  not  dictate 
unconditionally  to  the  mind  the  direction  which  its  thoughts  and 
purposes  shall  take.  Nor  does  it  determine  the  rate  at  which 
knowledge  shall  grow.  Human  thinking  in  its  theoretical  and 
practical  procedure  is  self-determining,  in  the  sense  that  it  selects 
the  data  which  it  shall  reconstruct  in  accordance  with  its  own  aims. 
The  history  of  science,  with  its  varied  rates  of  procedure  in  differ- 
ent fields  and  in  differeu4"  epochs  of  culture,  bears  out  this  truth. 
The  individuality  of  every  investigator  enters  into  his  choice  and 
manner  of  work  but,  still  more,  every  age  has  its  intellectual 
fashions  and  fads. 

The  responsiveness  of  the  external  world  to  the  permanent 
categories  and  changing  aims  of  human  thought  implies  a  dynamic 
correspondence,  an  organic  interrelationship  between  mind  and 
world.  Either  the  development  of  knowledge  is  the  coming  to 
awareness  in  minds,  and  the  expression  in  mind-made  symbols,  of 
this  dynamic  community;  and,  hence,  the  world  of  reality  is  in 
some  large  sense  a  rational  or  intelligible  system  akin  in  structure, 
though  on  a  much  vaster  scale,  to  mind ;  or  else  knowledge  hangs  in 
the  air,  its  validity  is  a  mere  human  prejudice  and  hence  even  the 
partial  successes  of  knowledge  give  us  no  authentic  tidings  of  the 
nature  of  reality. 

It  is  quite  the  fashion  to  argue  that  the  standard  mind  or 
social  mind  is  the  final  test  of  truth.  By  this  is  meant  the  agree- 
ment of  different  minds  under  the  same  conditions.  If  we  cannot 
apply  the  test  of  universal  consent,  quod  semper,  quod  ubique  ei 
ab  omnibus,  we  may  rely  on  the  experts,  and  experts  are  socially 
recognized  authorities.  The  truth  of  a  proposition,  then,  becomes 
a  question  of  its  social  standing;  and,  on  the  other  hand,  since 
men's  minds  notoriously  differ,  we  must  presuppose,  when  we 
apply  the  test,  that  we  are  making  reference  to  the  real  masters. 
I  do  not  question  the  practical  value  of  this  test.  The  authority  of 
experts  may  be  the  final  court  of  appeal  for  the  laymen.  But  this 
test,  after  all,  has  only  approximate  value.  Nobody  knows  who 
the  real  masters  are  but  the  masters  themselves  and  they  by  no 


118  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

means  always  agree.  Moreover,  the  social  test  rests  on  a  sup- 
pressed premise.  It  presupposes  a  common  rational  structure  in 
all  minds  and  the  possibility  of  a  common  relation  of  all  minds  to 
reality.  The  standard  mind  or  social  mind  is  an  abstraction. 
Thinking  goes  on,  and  truth  is  known,  only  in  individual  minds. 
Thus  the  very  recognition  of  other  minds  and  of  an  external  world 
common  to  minds  implies  that  the  individual  mind  is,  potentially 
at  least,  a  microcosmic  center  of  valid  intercourse  with  reality. 
The  self,  the  other  self  and  their  world,  must  all  be  elements  in  a 
systematic  and  intelligible  whole.  The  validity  of  truth  cannot 
depend  finally  upon  the  cooperative  thinking  of  human  society, 
since  in  the  latter  knowledge  is  always  imperfect  and  growing 
whereas  truth,  by  its  very  nature,  means  a  reality  not  created  by 
the  historical  and  psychological  accidents  of  discovery.  The  de- 
velopment of  society,  through  the  growth  of  knowledge,  presup- 
poses the  same  intelligible  and  systematic  order  of  reality  which 
the  cognitive  success  of  the  individual  mind  presupposes.  If  the 
conditions  of  the  validity  of  knowledge  are  not  directly  implicated 
in  the  movement  of  the  individual's  thinking  those  conditions  can- 
not be  established  by  averaging  individual  minds  into  a  standard 
social  mind. 

Doubtless,  knowledge  of  one's  neighbors  is,  at  all  stages  of 
human  development,  of  greater  practical  and  emotional  interest 
than  knowledge  of  nature.  But  this  does  not  place  the  former  on 
a  generically  different  plane  from  the  latter,  nor  give  it  a  validity 
of  a  higher  order.  Both  kinds  of  knowledge  begin  in  immediate 
experience — perceptions  of  contact,  form,  color,  movement,  etc., 
in  the  one  case;  and  the  feeling  of  another  life  and  consciousness 
in  the  other  case.2  How  much  in  the  dark  we  often  are  as  to  our 
fellows'  motives  and  ideas,  not  to  mention  those  of  the  animals! 

In  both  cases  our  knowledge  requires  to  be  corrected  and  en- 
larged by  the  same  mental  processes.  Both  forms  of  immediate 
experience  must  be  mediated,  in  order  to  yield  surer  practical 
guidance  and  a  fuller  insight. 

When  we  employ  the  various  logical  methods  of  investigating 
and  testing  the  results  of  thinking,  we  are  not  comparing  the  latter 
with  something  wholly  alien  to  itself.  We  are  testing  the  adequacy 
of  our  symbols  and  formulae  with  reference  to  the  ideal  of  a  self- 

2  Lipps  neatly  distinguishes  the  immediate  experience  of  external  objects 
and  of  other  selves  as  Empfindiing  and  Einfiihlung  respectively. 


THE  FINAL  GROUND  OF  KNOWLEDGE  119 

coherent  or  wholly  systematized  experience.  Knowledge  is  intra- 
experiential,  in  the  sense  that  the  materials  and  points  of  departure 
for  cognitive  thinking  are  found  in  immediate  experience;  and, 
again,  knowledge  involves  all  along  the  line  a  reference  to  experi- 
ence, in  the  sense  that  its  goal  is  a  complete  or  perfected  experi- 
ence, in  which  every  datum  is  become  an  element  in  a  harmonious 
system.  On  the  other  hand,  in  relation  to  any  actual  experience, 
cognitive  thinking  has  always  a  transcendent  reference,  since  this 
complete  or  perfect  experience  is  for  us  in  part  only  "ideal"  or 
"possible."  We  can  conceive  reality  as  a  systematic  and  self- 
consistent  whole  only  in  terms  of  the  structure  and  functions  of  a 
"possible"  perfect  experience  or  transcendental  mind;  a  mind  that 
transcends  in  its  complete  coherence  the  mind  of  every  finite  self 
and  in  which  all  the  data  of  knowledge  are  present  in  their  organic 
unity.  Valid  knowledge  is  the  symbol  of,  and  the  actual  reference 
of  the  individual's  thought  to  a  reality,  which,  whatever  the  quali- 
tative variety  and  quantitative  multiplicity  of  its  elements,  must 
have  those  coherences  or  relationships  that  are  commonly  called 
"rational." 

While  truth  has  for  me  its  point  of  departure  in  my  experi- 
ence, and  implies  other  selves,  its  ultimate  reference  must  tran- 
scend the  experience  of  any  finite  self.  And  knowledge  is  always 
the  reflective  consciousness  of  some  relation  or  group  of  relations 
between  a  thinking  mind  and  the  systematic  whole  of  a  self- 
coherent  reality  in  which  the  mind  so  thinking  is  an  element. 
Reality  may  have  many  series  of  increasingly  inclusive  systematic 
unities,  from  that  of  unconscious  physical  centers  of  relationship 
up  to  that  of  an  absolute  self-luminous  unity  of  "ideal"  experience. 
If  reality  in  all  its  forms  were  not  always  intelligible,  at  least  in 
promise  and  potency,  knowledge  could  have  no  absolute  validity. 
Truth  for  man  is  an  individual  achievement  and  possession  here 
and  now  in  a  particular  mind,  and  yet  it  must  possess  universality 
of  reference,  that  is,  be  timelessly  valid  for  all.  How  can  we 
reconcile  these  attributes  of  truth  ?  Kant  and  his  immediate  fol- 
lowers based  the  objectivity  of  truth  on  the  existence  of  a  con- 
sciousness or  mind  common  to  all  individuals,  but,  in  itself,  over- 
individual  and  absolutely  distinct  from  the  empirical  ego.  But 
they  failed  to  make  clear  the  relation  of  this  universal  conscious- 
ness (Bewusstsein  iiberhaupt)  or  "transcendental  ego"  to  the  indi- 
vidualized human  consciousness.    In  Kant's  theoretical  philosophy 


120  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

the  former  seems  to  be  a  merely  formal  unity.  And,  from  one 
point  of  view,  the  metaphysics  of  Fichte  and  Hegel  were  attempts 
simply  to  bring  this  notion  of  a  universal  mind  into  more  definite 
relation  with  that  of  the  individual  mind.  We  must  now  consider 
this  problem. 

I  have  already  maintained  that  thinking  selves  develop  knowl- 
edge or  attain  truth  only  in  community  with  other  members  of  a 
relational  system,  and  that  the  success  of  the  individual  mind  in 
reaching  truth  indicates  that  the  world  of  reality  need  contain 
nothing  absolutely  impenetrable  by  mind.  Individual  minds  have 
knowledge  only  as  members  of  an  intelligible  system  of  things. 
Community  of  experience  and  universality,  as  attributes  of  truth, 
involve  a  fundamental  identity  of  function,  and  hence  of  nature, 
in  the  elements  of  reality.  Hence  reality,  in  its  systematic  totality 
of  meaning,  must  be  a  rational  unity.  The  total  real  must  have 
that  intelligible  character  which  is  demanded  by  the  place  that 
human  cognitive  activity  occupies  therein.  If  any  knowledge  be 
valid,  then  the  real  universe  is  an  intelligible  and  systematic 
whole,  that  is,  a  rational  organization.  If  there  be  any  truth,  and 
if  the  real  world  be  a  unity,  this  truth  is  valid  only  as  an  element 
in  a  systematic  whole  of  meaning.  This  systematic  whole  must 
signify,  or  define,  in  terms  of  meaning  and  value,  that  aspect  of 
reality  which  exists  as  the  totality  of  objects  of  truth. 

Truth,  we  say,  is  universal  and  necessary.  By  these  attributes 
we  obviously  mean  that  any  normal  mind,  placed  in  the  same  con- 
ditions and  having  had  the  same  training  and  antecedent  experi- 
ence, must  recognize  the  truth,  or  significant  reference  to  existence, 
of  the  judgment  which  we  have  made  or  accepted.  But  to  appeal 
to  a  normal  mind  as  the  standard  of  recognition  for  truth  is  to 
assume  a  common  and  universal  structure  and  functioning  in  indi- 
vidual minds.  This  common  rational  structure  is  the  universal 
mind  or  thinker,  the  ground  of  the  relational  or  rational  system 
which  is  the  ideal  of  knowledge. 

The  ultimate  subject  of  reference  in  valid  knowledge,  then,  is 
a  systematic  cosmic  mind.  Just  in  so  far  as  the  world  is  a  uni- 
verse it  must  be  embodied  mind.  The  reality  of  this  mind  is  pre- 
supposed whenever  we  test  our  judgments  and  theories  by  refer- 
ence, either  to  the  general  conditions  of  valid  thinking,  or  to  the 
special  conditions  of  actual  existence.  The  test  of  self-consistency, 
that  is,   of  noncontradiction   in   a   system,   implies  the  ultimate 


THE  FINAL  GROUND   OF   KNOWLEDGE  121 

reality  of  the  rational  coherent  structure  which  functions  in  indi- 
vidual minds.  The  tesl  of  empirical  reference  to  perception,  in 
entific  induction,  presupposes  the  coherence  of  the  physical 
world-order  with  the  structure  and  aims  of  mind  in  us.  If  there 
be  any  truth,  the  existing  objects  to  which  truth  makes  valid  and 
aificant  reference  must  possess  the  specific  character  which 
makes  truth  valid  and  Leant.    If  truth  be  valid,  the  elements 

of  reality  which  are  not  in  them       nsciously  significant  ideas, 

or  valid  meanings,  must  conform  to  valid  meanings,  that  is,  to 
cognitive  acts  of  reference.  In  short,  ultimate  reality  is  twofold 
in  nature.  It  includes,  in  organic  interrelationship,  the  valid 
reality  of  truth,  or  of  the  system  of  cognitive  meanings,  and  the 
existential  reality  of  thought's  objects  of  reference.  And  the  valid 
reality  of  truth  as  a  systematic  whole  presupposes  that  all  existent 
objects,  whether  physical  or  psychical,  are  possible  subjects  of 
cognitive  meanings.  Ultimate  reality,  then,  must  be  a  duality-in- 
unity — cosmic  thought  whose  object  is  the  cosmos. 

Indeed,  mind  or  spirit  is  e--<  ntially  a  self-realizing  process 
which  knows,  feels,  and  acts  through  "differences,"  and  which 
fulfills  itself  in  overcoming  differences.  In  winning  truth,  mind 
affirms  its  oneness  with  the  "other"  or  "object"  to  which  truth 
refers,  as,  in  winning  the  good,  mind  affirms  the  oneness  of  its 
impulses  and  character  with  an  ideal  end,  or  as,  in  experiencing 
the  beautiful,  mind  feels  its  harmony  with  the  object.  The 
unceasing  movement  of  mind  towards  conscious  self-possession  and 
self-determination,  through  that  which  is  other  than  itself,  is  the 
primal  condition  of  its  conscious  meaningful  life.  Did  this  move- 
ment cease,  mind  must  relapse  into  the  unconsciousness  of  a  dead 
thing. 

Truth,  in  the  specific  sense,  is  always  the  significant  symbol  of 
relationships  of  things  which  belong  to  some  kind  of  system.  Even 
the  truths  of  mathematics  are  but  highly  generalized  signs  of  rela- 
1  ion-hip  among  real  things.  Now,  relationships  that  could  not  be 
cognized  or  felt  by  some  mind  would  be  unmeaning.  One  who 
asserts  the  existence  of  relationships  inaccessible  to  any  thinking 
center  is  able  to  do  so  only  because,  in  thinking  this  supposed  inde- 
pendence, he  presupposes  implicitly  some  sort  of  world  mind  or 
objective  rational  structure,  relationships  signify  intelligible 
connections,  and  the  reality  of  the  latter  presupposes  a  constitutive 
or  sustaining  act  of  intelligence. 


122  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

There  can,  then,  be  no  truth  or  knowledge  which  does  not 
obtain  in  and  for  some  mind.  And,  if  there  can  be  no  world  of 
existents  unqualified  by  truth  or  meaning,  there  can  be  no  world 
of  existents  without  a  world  mind.  One  might,  of  course,  arbi- 
trarily assume  a  reality  utterly  independent  of  all  mind;  but  a 
reality  of  this  sort  would  be  forever  beyond  the  pale  of  discussion 
and  utterly  meaningless,  since  without  positive  reference  to  our 
experience.  Hence,  the  whole  system  of  psychical  and  other  finite 
existences,  with  whose  interactions  and  interpassions  the  indi- 
vidual knower's  experience  is  inextricably  bound  up,  and  on  which 
in  specific  cases  knowledge  seems  to  depend  for  the  validity  of  its 
meanings,  must  in  turn  depend  upon  a  more  intimate  systematic 
unity.  The  system  of  individual  experiences  must  have  a  real 
basis  for  the  unity  that  it  depends  upon  at  every  moment  in  its 
life  and  for  its  continuity  from  moment  to  moment  in  the  world's 
history.  The  common  basis  for  thought  and  knowledge  must 
transcend  alike  the  individual  consciousness  and  the  so-called 
"social  consciousness,"  which  latter  is  real  only  as  a  set  or  attitude 
of  the  individual  mind.  It  follows  from  the  principle  that  nothing 
can  at  once  exist  and  have  meaning  which  does  not  exist  for  a 
mind,  that  the  single  ground  of  the  social  system  of  individual 
meanings  must  be  for  some  mind  or  center  of  experience.  In  a 
final  analysis  the  objectivity  of  truth,  the  valid  reference  of  knowl- 
edge to  reality,  depends  on  the  reality  of  a  single,  systematic 
intelligence,  which  must  have  a  determinate  character,  since  it  is 
the  ground  of  a  determinate  system  of  cognitions. 

But,  now,  the  question  confronts  us:  Why  need  there  be  any 
absolute  truth  at  all  ?  What  right  has  one  to  assume  that  any 
knowledge  has  final  validity,  that  any  system  of  cognitive  meanings 
is  honored  by  the  universe,  that  things  have  any  ultimate  signifi- 
cance whatsoever  ?  These  queries  might  be  answered  by  pointing 
to  the  splendid  practical  successes  of  science  in  giving  man  control 
over  the  physical  world.  But  this  would  be  only  a  makeshift 
answer.  For,  again,  the  objection  might  be  urged  that  our  knowl- 
edge is,  after  all,  as  yet  very  limited,  is  constantly  changing,  and 
the  years  of  human  science  are  infinitesimally  few  in  comparison 
with  the  ageless  duration  of  the  universe.  Therefore,  it  is  possible 
that  our  fragmentary  science,  with  its  ideal  of  systematic  com- 
pleteness forever  unrealized,  is  but  a  happy  hit  which  more  or  less 
successfully  fits  into  the  present  phase  of  an  ageless,  ever  changing 


THE  FINAL  GROUND   OF  KNOWLEDGE  123 

chaos.  The  vaunted  fitness  of  science  to  the  world  may  be  but  a 
chance  coincidence  amidst  a  chaos  of  innumerable  possibilites. 
On  the  ground  of  a  utilitarian  success  alone,  we  are  not  entitled  to 
assume  any  final  validity  in  knowledge  nor  any  absolute  truth. 

It  is  true,  nevertheless,  that  the  skeptic  is  himself  unable  to 
refrain  from  assertion  or  judgment  of  some  sort.  In  his  deepest 
doubt  there  lurks  the  assumption  of  a  possible  knowable  truth. 
Even  when  he  suspends  judgment  and  refrains  from  any  assertion, 
he  assumes  that  he  knows  enough  about  the  nature  of  things  to 
make  every  more  specific  assertion  futile.  In  short,  to  seek  truth 
is  a  fundamental  impulse  of  rational  human  nature,  an  impulse 
from  which  the  most  radical  skeptic  cannot  free  himself.  To 
become  reflectively  aware  of  any  experience  is  to  make  judgments, 
and  to  make  a  judgment  is  to  assume  that  some  reality  is  intelli- 
gible, that  some  truth  is  valid.  Even  the  skeptic  cannot  free  him- 
self from  the  rule  of  the  instinct  to  know.  His  most  radical  ques- 
tionings presuppose  the  possibility  of  an  answer.  His  most  con- 
sistent attempts  to  suspend  all  judgment  imply  at  the  least  this 
judgment  about  reality,  viz.,  that  it  is  so  constituted  that  no  human 
judgment  can  be  valid  for  it,  or  that  there  is  no  means  of  deter- 
mining whether  any  specific  judgment  is  valid. 

In  short,  to  think  at  all,  even  in  terms  of  the  most  radical 
skepticism,  is  to  assume  the  validity  of  truth.  We  must  seek  truth 
and  promote  its  recognition,  because  it  is  a  mode  or  function  of 
the  common  spiritual  nature  in  men.  Truth  is  an  end  in  itself, 
since  it  is  an  integral  pulsation  of  universal  reason  in  the  spirit 
of  man.  In  attaining  truth  the  individual  thinker  is  entering  into 
the  universal  heritage  of  mind. 

Serious  objection  may  be  made  to  the  doctrine  that  the  supreme 
cosmic  or  systematic  intelligence,  on  which  truth  is  made  to  rest, 
has  self-consciousness.  It  may  be  urged  that,  however  completely 
I  may  organize  my  experience  into  knowledge,  still  my  experience 
and  thought,  as  finite,  are  dependent  on  a  "not-self"  or  "other." 
Knowledge  seems  always  to  involve  both  a  resemblance  or  com- 
munity of  nature  between  the  knowing  self  and  the  not-self  or 
"other,"  and  a  duality  of  being.  So  far  as  our  insight  goes,  it 
seems,  then,  that  the  very  condition  of  a  conscious  selfhood  and, 
therefore,  of  experience  and  knowledge  in  general,  is  the  existence 
of  an  element  that  cannot  be  comprehended  in  or  absorbed  into  the 
self's  thinking.    Therefore,  it  may  be  said,  as  soon  as  one  conceives 


124  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

knowledge  to  be  absolute,  one  thinks  the  self  as  absolutely 
coincident  with  the  data  of  experience.  Knowing  "self"  and 
known  "object"  collapse  or  coalesce  into  a  higher  unity.3  The 
objective  reference  or  validity  of  knowledge  in  relation  to  the 
materials  of  experience  ceases,  since  there  is  no  longer  any  existen- 
tially  outer  object  or  "other"  to  which  thought  can  be  referred  by 
the  self.  Knowledge,  when  it  becomes  absolute,  fuses  wholly  with 
its  object  and  self -consciousness  ceases,  or  is  transmuted  into  some- 
thing else — into  some  higher,  and,  by  us,  inconceivable  kind  of 
experience.  It  would  follow  that  in  this  higher  state  of  insight 
or  experience  there  can  be  no  longer  any  cognitive  consciousness, 
as  we  human  beings  understand  consciousness,  nor  any  truth  as  we 
conceive  truth.  The  complete  union  of  self  and  not-self  results  in 
something  which  may  be  more  than  a  conscious  self,  but  which 
certainly  cannot  be  a  self  in  the  sense  in  which  we  know  the  self 
reflectively.  Hence,  the  systematic  intelligence  on  which  the 
whole  of  knowledge  depends  cannot  be  self-conscious  and  nothing 
can  be  true  for  it.  It  may  be  a  perfectly  harmonious  immediate 
experience  a  la  Mr.  Bradley,  but  it  cannot  be  a  self. 

Now,  it  must  be  admitted  that,  if  a  self-coherent  totality  of 
truth  be  real  in  and  for  a  consciousness,  the  relation  of  such  a  con- 
sciousness to  some  of  its  objects  (that  is,  to  those  objects  of  its 
knowledge  that  are  not  its  own  internal  and  immediate  states  of 
feeling)  must  differ  decidedly  from  the  relation  of  any  human 
consciousness  to  its  corresponding  objects.  For  us  objects  always 
remain  partially  opaque.  Truth  cannot  be  a  perfect  organism, 
unless  it  mean  the  thorough  comprehension  by  the  knower  of  the 
determinate  world  of  objects.  A  universal  knower  must,  then,  as 
conscious  knower,  have  a  world  of  "objects"  and,  as  perfect  knower, 
must  wholly  penetrate,  with  an  intuitive  insight,  this  world.  Such 
a  knower  must  be  in  some  sense  the  ground  of  his  own  experience. 


'  Those  who  emphasize  the  ' '  immediate ' '  character  of  ' '  absolute ' '  in- 
sight, as  a  state  in  which  the  distinction  of  knowing  subject  and  object  of 
thought  is  "abolished,"  "overcome,"  or  "transcended,"  are  fond  of  citing 
emotion  and,  especially,  personal  love,  as  illustrations  of  what  sort  this  higher 
state  may  be.  But  the  illustrations  are  hardly  satisfactory  from  their  stand- 
point. In  personal  love  the  distinction  between  lover  and  beloved  is  not 
abolished  or  overcome.  Requited  love  is  surely  a  case  of  unity-in-duality. 
The  two  persons  are,  indeed,  one,  but  thereby  their  distinctive  personalities 
are  enhance*!  and  enriched  to  one  another,  not  transmuted  into  a  higher  im- 
personal unity.  Love  is,  indeed,  a  good  illustration  of  what  knowledge  strives 
to  become  without  ceasing  to  be  knowledge. 


THE  FINAL  GROUND   OF  KNOWLEDGE  125 

So  far  as  his  experience  depends  on  the  activities  and  experiences 
of  other  beings,  their  experiences  must,  in  turn,  somehow  depend 
on  his  activity.  A  world  which  is  the  "other"  of  his  thought  can- 
not have  self-existence  external  to  his  will.  Hence,  such  a  knower 
must  sustain  the  world  of  objects  which  he  knows.  The  "opposi- 
tion" between  his  thought  and  its  objects,  for  example,  the  move- 
ments of  a  material  system  or  the  activities  of  living  and  conscious 
beings,  must  originate  in  his  own  activity.  His  life  can  be 
"limited"  or  "determined,"  only  in  the  sense  that  he  is  conscious 
as  originating  an  "opposition"  through  and  in  which  he  finds  con- 
sciousness; in  other  words,  he  is  conscious  as  self-determining 
activity  that  constitutes  the  "other"  for  his  own  conscious  experi- 
ence. 

This  is  a  difficult  notion  that  probably  no  amount  of  reflection 
will  make  plain  to  our  finite  and  growing  minds.  But  sun-clear 
lucidity  is  not  to  be  expected  in  such  matters.  Moreover,  there  is 
that  in  the  nature  of  human  consciousness  which  gives  us  some 
inkling  of  the  possible  nature  of  a  "higher"  consciousness.  For 
it  is  not  true  that  knowledge,  in  all  its  phases,  depends  on  the 
opposition  of  a  wholly  external  ''other."  The  impulse  to  know  is 
by  no  means  always  a  compulsion  from  without,  and  in  self- 
knowledge  the  object  is  within  the  knower's  thought.  The  higher 
phases  of  knowledge  involve  the  self-initiative  of  the  knower  who 
in  knowing  enlarges  his  being. 

In  order  to  satisfy  its  demands  for  reflectivefinsight  into  the 
nature  of  things,  the  finite  self  must  seemingly  go  outside  its  pres- 
ent selfhood.  But,  indeed,  the  truer  view  is  that  in  knowledge,  as 
in  any  kind  of  genuine  self-activity,  growth  in  depth,  extent,  and 
organization  involves  a  constant  dialectic  movement  between  the 
two  poles  of  internally  initiated  interests  and  activity  and  exter- 
nally given  materials  and  obstacles.  And  the  goal  of  this  move- 
ment is  twofold — the  internal  appropriation  or  interpretation  of 
the  not-self,  and  the  expansion  and  enrichment  of  the  self.  In  this 
dialectic  process  of  development  through  "opposition,"  the  mind 
assimilates  a  seemingly  foreign  world  more  and  more  completely 
to  itself  and  enlarges  its  own  being  thereby.  In  knowledge,  which 
is  a  special  case  of  this  general  movement,  the  "other,"  which  first 
appears  as  a  negation  of  the  knowing  mind,  is  progressively  over- 
come and  unified  with  the  mind. 

The  process  of  knowledge,   and,  indeed,  of  experience  as  a 


126  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

whole,  is  a  progressive  overcoming  of  the  fundamental  antithesis 
between  self  and  not-self,  which  is  the  nerve  of  all  intellectual 
activity,  of  moral  endeavor,  aesthetic  vision,  and  religious  aspira- 
tion. The  meaning  of  the  antithesis  is  that  it  is  there  to  be  over- 
come; and  the  self  is  potentially  infinite,  since  it  can  overcome 
unceasingly  the  opposition  in  question.  It  does  overcome  this 
opposition,  and  make  it  tributory  to  its  own  self-fulfillment,  in 
finding  the  true,  as  in  willing  the  good  and  enjoying  the  beautiful. 

This  process  of  self-realization  is  illustrated  in  the  social  world, 
where  selves  cooperate  to  win  truth  and  goodness  and  to  embody 
the  vision  of  beauty.  The  farther  the  social  relationships  of  selves 
develop,  in  the  direction  of  mutual  understanding  and  inclusive 
sympathy,  the  more  completely  does  the  single  self  learn  to  find 
itself  in  and  through  other  selves.  It  dies  to  its  narrow  selfhood  to 
live  in  a  larger  experience.  The  primitive  savage  is  so  ignorant 
and  fearful  that  to  him  every  stranger  is  an  enemy,  a  point  of 
absolute  "opposition."  The  cultivated  man  of  the  twentieth  cen- 
tury can  appreciate  the  meaning  of  a  world-literature  and  cherish 
the  thought  of  a  universal  peace  and  of  a  humane  social  ethics. 
He  lives  through  and  with  others  in  a  vastly  wider,  richer,  and 
more  harmonious  experience  than  that  of  the  savage.  The  deeper 
and  more  harmonious  a  self's  experiences  become,  the  more 
rationally  communicable  and  sharable  do  they  grow.  Progress  in 
rational  self-consciousness  is  at  once  a  growth  in  internal  self- 
enlightenment  and  in  communal  experience.  A  living  world  of 
socially  related  individual  centers  tends  toward  fuller  unity-in- 
variety.  And  the  "otherness"  of  its  world  of  things  and  selves  is 
a  prime  condition  of  the  human  self's  growth  in  knowledge,  as  in 
goodness  and  in  all  the  forms  of  harmonious  experience.  Without 
"opposition,"  "contrast"  or  "negativity"  to  be  lived  through,  there 
is  no  reflective  insight  and  no  ethical  volition.  Now,  the  growth  in 
knowledge  is  simply  the  explication  and  the  revelation  of  that  com- 
munity between  the  self  and  its  world  (of  things  and  selves)  which 
is  implicit  from  the  very  outset  of  mental  life. 

Object  and  subject  of  knowledge,  then,  are  strictly  co-relative. 
The  imperfection  and  indirection  of  our  human  knowledge  result 
from  the  finite  and  growing  character  of  the  individual  members 
of  the  world  system,  both  as  knowers  and  as  known.  On  the  other 
hand,  if  there  be  a  systematic,  self-consistent  whole  of  truth,  the 
mind  for  which  this  truth  is  true  must  have  an  insight  that  wholly 


THE  FINAL  GROUND   OF  KNOWLEDGE  127 

penetrates,  while  yet  it  consciously  lives  in,  the  contrast  of  subject- 
knower  and  object-known.  Its  knowledge,  it  would  seem,  can 
neither  be  impelled  nor  limited  by  anything  that  remains  stub- 
bornly outside  the  reach  of  its  experience  and  immediate  insight. 

A  supreme  mind,  of  course,  could  not  be  a  knower  without  an 
object  of  knowledge.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  if  such  a  mind  be 
the  ground  of  truth  in  its  self-consistent  totality,  that  is,  if  it  be 
the  source  and  basis  of  the  unity  and  continuity  of  cognition  in 
finite  centers  of  being,  then  the  "objects"  of  its  knowledge  cannot 
constitute  external  and  stubbornly  opaque  limits  to  its  world 
insight.  Every  object,  for  a  supreme  self,  must  depend  on  the 
consent  of  his  will  or  somehow  have  its  basis  of  existence  in  his 
being.  The  finite  self  may  possess  its  own  unique  experience  and 
be  the  proximate  initiating  center  of  its  own  deeds,  but  its  being 
and  action  must  be  impossible  out  of  relation  to  the  supreme  mind 
who  sustains  its  life  and  experience  as  an  element  in  the  whole 
system  of  reality.  One  could  not  conceive  a  supreme  mind  without 
finite  centers  of  experience.  Their  lives  and  activities  must  enter, 
as  elements,  into  the  unity  of  its  insight.  Just  as  a  finite  self  may 
be  said  to  have  his  experiences  sympathetically  reproduced  by 
other  finite  selves,  so  by  analogy  a  supreme  mind  may  be  said  to 
apprehend  intuitively  and  in  perfect  degree  the  mind  of  a  finite 
self  without  abolishing  the  latter's  unique  experience  and  life. 
Mind  can  give  to  mind  without  losing,  and  take  without  robbing. 
Truth  may  be  shared  in  common  by  a  multitude  of  minds  and  yet 
refer  to  one  indivisible  object.  So  a  finite  self,  here  and  now,  will 
have  this  bit  of  experience  or  this  particular  propositional  truth  as 
a  unique  element  in  his  mental  history,  but  the  final  validity  and 
significance  of  this  local  and  limited  experience  will  depend  upon 
its  relations  in  and  to  the  whole  of  the  absolute  or  "ideal"  experi- 
ence of  the  supreme  mind.  The  latter  may  know  our  experiences 
as  elements  in  the  systematic  meaning  of  the  universe,  while  our 
experiences  remain  uniquely  valid  for  us. 

Of  course,  it  is  possible  to  assert  that  knowledge  is  but  a 
transient  episode  in  an  unconscious  universe.  But,  if  so,  and  if 
the  universe  have  any  coherence,  then  no  knowledge  is  true,  since 
there  is  no  absolute  whole  of  truth.  If  there  be  no  organism  of 
truth,  then  the  statement  that  knowledge  is  an  episode  in  an  un- 
conscious universe  is  untrue,  and  there  is  no  universe  except  for 
one  who  is  willing  to  make  unmeaning  assertions. 


128  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

The  "experience"  or  knowledge  possessed  by  the  universal 
mind  or  spirit  must,  as  we  have  seen,  be  direct  and  intuitive,  in 
contrast  with  the  hindered  and  piecemeal  character  of  most  of  our 
human  knowledge.  The  Universal  Mind  must  apprehend  truth  in 
its  systematic  totality,  and  the  absolute  truth  must  be  the  whole 
system  of  relations  and  terms  which  is  intuitively  perceived  or 
grasped  in  a  single  and  continuous  act  by  such  a  mind. 

It  would  seem  to  follow  that  neither  the  truths  of  mathematics 
nor  of  perception  (the  two  poles  of  human  knowledge)  need  exist 
for  such  a  mind  precisely  as  they  exist  for  our  minds.  Obviously 
perceptive  intelligence  in  such  a  mind  must  grasp  every  item  of 
perception  in  all  its  relations,  and  this  our  minds  never  do.  The 
universal  mind  must  be  an  intuitive  intelligence;  our  minds  are 
largely  discursive  in  their  operations.  For  example,  the  proposi- 
tion that  2  -f-  2  =  4,  or  that  the  three  interior  angles  of  a  triangle 
are  together  equal  to  two  right  angles,  need  not  represent  acts  of 
thought  for  a  perfect  intuitive  intelligence.  Grasping  space  in  its 
final  truth,  in  the  totality  of  the  real,  such  a  mind  does  not  need 
to  geometrize.  I  venture  to  suggest  that  the  intuitive  processes  of 
the  highest  genius  in  science,  poetry,  art,  processes  which  tran- 
scend discursive  thinking,  give  us  the  best  hints  of  the  nature  of  a 
supreme  intuitive  intelligence  at  once  universal  and  individual. 

While  the  universal  mind  is  the  necessary  implicate  of  the 
system  of  finite  existences,  sentient  and  insentient,  and  cannot  be 
thought  out  of  relation  to  these,  it  cannot  be  an  existent  in  the 
same  sense  in  which  finite  things  exist.  Its  being  must  at  once 
transcend  every  form  of  existence  and  sustain  the  system  of  the 
finite  in  its  organized  totality  of  meanings  or  of  truth.  The  ulti- 
mate presupposition  of  truth's  reality  or  validity  is  a  transcendent 
mind  or  "ideal"  experience,  whose  being  is  the  pure  actuality  of 
intuitive  thinking  or  active  reason,  and  whose  expression  is  two- 
fold— the  validity  of  knowledge  and  the  system  of  finite  existents 
concerning  which  knowledge  is  valid. 

It  is  not  difficult  to  see  that  truths  of  logical  and  mathematical 
relationships  may  constitute  one  unchangeable  system  of  truths, 
the  object  of  an  absolute  thinker's  reason.  But  the  case  is  very 
different  with  the  concrete  and  particular  truths  of  fact  in  a 
developing  or  evolving  world.  If  the  world  be  really  in  evolution 
the  succession  of  facts  and  deeds  in  the  world  process  cannot  be,  as 
such,  one  eternal  and  unchangeable  system  for  any  thinker.     The 


THE  FINAL  GROUND  OF  KNOWLEDGE  129 

knowledge  of  events  and  deeds  in  the  world's  history  must  involve 
a  time  sequence.  The  time  process  must  be  real.  There  may  be 
at  any  instant  a  single,  continuous  and  comprehensive  whole  of 
intuitive  insight  into  the  events  and  relations  of  the  evolving  world. 
But  such  a  knowledge  cannot  be  eternally  unchangeable.  The  his- 
tories of  selves  and  their  world  must  make  a  difference  in  the 
supreme  intuitive  experience.  The  so-called  timeless  or  eternal 
truths  of  logic  and  mathematics  can  represent  only  the  structural 
skeleton  of  the  world  order.  On  the  other  hand,  if  truth  implies  a 
thinker  or  knower  then  the  truths  of  fact  and  deed  in  the  evolving 
history  of  the  world  must,  if  the  universe  be  a  coherent  and  intel- 
ligible universe,  constitute  elements  in  the  universal  knower's 
experience.  The  latter  must  be  a  unitary  intuition  or  systematic 
whole  of  meaning.  The  world  process,  inclusive  of  the  histories  of 
finite  selves,  must  enter  into  this  one  concrete  living  and  dynamic 
intuition.  The  world  experiencer  must  manifest  his  being  and 
know  himself  in  the  total  process  of  temporal  reality.  All  truth 
won  and  error  perpetrated  by  finite  selves  must  be  contributory  to 
his  total  insight.  The  world  experient  must  be  more  than  con- 
sciousness and  more  than  thought.  It  must  be  the  self-active  whole 
of  meaning  or  will-reason  which  lives  and  energizes  through  the 
lives  of  developing  selves  in  an  evolving  world.  Its  intuition  of  its 
world  of  things  and  selves  must  depend  upon  its  own  originating 
and  sustaining  activity  manifested  in  the  world. 


BOOK  II 

THE  GENERAL  STRUCTURE  OF  REALITY- 
THE  CATEGORIES 


CHAPTER  IX 

WHAT  ARE   CATEGORIES? 

Category  means  a  fundamental  form  of  predication  or  asser- 
tion. Every  science  and  every  principal  form  of  man's  reflective 
activity  has  its  guiding  categories.  For  example,  we  speak  of  the 
categories  of  physics,  of  biology,  and  of  natural  science  in  general ; 
of  the  categories  of  historical  or  social  thought ;  of  the  categories  of 
literary  and  artistic  interpretation;  of  the  categories  of  moral, 
social  and  religious  thought  and  practice.  Philosophy,  regarded  as 
a  criticism  of  the  categories,  is  the  enterprise  of  determining 
what  are  the  fundamental  categories  for  the  interpretation  of 
experience,  and  of  organizing  these  fundamental  categories  into  a 
coherent  system.  Philosophy  inquires  whether  there  are  certain 
universals,  or  ultimate  forms  of  predication,  which  apply  to  all 
types  of  existence ;  how  these  ultimate  forms  are  related  and  what 
positions  and  validity  the  special  categories  have  in  the  whole 
system  of  the  categorial  interpretation  of  experience.  For  ex- 
ample, the  categories  of  identity  and  diversity,  quality  and  quan- 
tity, particularity,  individuality  and  universality,  substantiality, 
causality  and  community  or  reciprocity,  are  applicable  to  all  sorts 
of  empirical  things;  we  can  apply  them  all  to  rocks,  plants,  ani- 
mals, minds  or  planets.  On  the  other  hand  the  categories  of  end 
and  value  are  not  obviously  applicable  to  the  interpretation  of 
physical  things ;  the  applicability  of  the  latter  categories  seems  to 
imply  the  presence  of  minds  or  at  least  of  organisms.  We  shall 
now  consider  the  fundamental  categories  or  primary  universals. 

The  primary  categories  are  nonempirical  conditions  of  em- 
pirical reality;  nonempirical,  not  in  the  sense  that  they  are  not 
found  in  experience,  but  in  the  sense  that  their  meanings  and 
applications  do  not  depend  upon  any  specific  set  of  empirical 
qualities,  since  they  are  applicable  to  every  sort  of  empirical 
subject  matter.  (This,  I  take  it,  is  what  Kant  meant  when  he  said 
the  categories  were  transcendental  conditions  of  experience.    They 

133 


134  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

transcend  any  experience,  since  they  are  presupposed  in  thinking 
all  experience.) 

The  categories  are  forms  both  of  thought  and  of  things.  The 
mind  is  awakened  to  the  use  of  them  by  the  impact  of  experience. 
They  are  implicitly  present  in  experience  from  its  very  beginning. 
Through  the  reflective  organization  of  experience,  the  mind  finds 
the  categories  in  its  world  as  the  texture  of  relations  which  makes 
an  ordered  or  significant  experience.  Thus,  the  mind  neither 
invents  the  categories  in  a  vacuum  nor  are  they  pitchforked  into 
the  mind  by  the  senses.  The  ordering  of  experience  is  one  aspect 
of  a  single  process,  of  which  the  reflective  organization  of  mind  is 
the  other  aspect.  If  there  were  not  a  dynamic  correspondence,  a 
constant  active  intercourse  of  thought  with  the  rest  of  reality,  the 
categories  would  be  a  priori  cobwebs,  fictions  spun  by  the  mind  out 
of  its  own  inwards;  and  the  world  experienced  would  not  be  a 
world  but  a  chaos.  In  discussing  the  categories  I  shall  therefore 
proceed  upon  the  assumption  of  an  active  and  successful  corre- 
spondence of  thought  and  reality.  In  other  words  my  working 
hypothesis  is  that  the  more  experience  is  categorized,  the  fuller 
the  revelation  of  the  nature  of  reality  and  of  the  correspondent 
nature  of  mind.  This  hypothesis,  of  course,  implies  that  uni- 
versals  are  just  as  real  as  particulars,  since  categories  are  primary 
universals.  Indeed  it  implies  that  reality  is  a  universe  or  cosmos, 
an  organic  or  systematic  whole  of  particulars  in  relation.1 

The  most  important  systematic  treatments  of  the  categories  in 
modern  thought  are  probably  still  those  of  Kant  and  Hegel.  The 
most  thorough  and  instructive  discussion  of  them  in  contemporary 
literature  is,  so  far  as  I  know,  that  of  Mr.  S.  Alexander  in  Space, 
Time  and  Deity.  For  lack  of  space  and  time  I  shall  make  but 
scant  reference  to  Mr.  Alexander's  fine  work.  My  own  standpoint 
is  quite  different  from  his,  but  I  wish  to  say  that  no  one  can  afford 
to  consider  seriously  this  subject,  which  is  the  very  heart  of  meta- 
physics, without  weighing  carefully  Mr.  Alexander's  treatment  of 
the  categories. 

Can  we  find  a  clew  to  the  complete  ordering  of  the  categories  ? 
Kant  was  misguided  when  he  found  the  clew  in  the  table  of  the 


1  This  means,  of  course,  a  rejection  of  the  Kantian  doctrine  of  a  noumenal 
reality  distinct  from  the  realm  of  phenomenal  existence  and  to  which  the 
categories  do  not  apply.  In  fact  Kant  failed  to  keep  consistently  to  this 
distinction. 


WHAT  ARE  CATEGORIES?  135 

judgment  forms  of  formal  logic.  His  table  of  the  categories  is  both 
redundant  and  incomplete.  For  example,  categories  of  quality  are 
repeated  in  the  categories  of  modality.  Identity  and  diversity, 
universality  and  particularity,  receive  no  adequate  treatment. 
Moreover  Kant's  categories  remain  functionless  and  inert  in  a  high 
a  'priori  vacuum  until  they  are  put  to  work  in  the  schematism  of 
the  imagination.  Hegel  tried  to  derive  all  the  categories  by  the 
immanent  movement  of  the  dialectic  process,  which  process  is  for 
him  the  moving  spirit  of  mind  and  of  reality,  since  reality,  as  a 
whole,  is  the  absolute,  all-inclusive  mind  or  individual.  The 
moving  principle  is  negation  or  contradiction;  thus  non-being  is 
the  negation,  the  complete  opposite  or  contradictory,  of  being; 
therefore  empty  being  is  the  same  as  non-being.  Being,  the  thesis, 
and  non-being,  its  antithesis,  are  synthesized  in  becoming.  What 
Hegel  really  meant  was  that  all  real  being  is  determinate  being. 
Non-being  is  the  bare  negation  of  existence.  To  say  that  non-being 
is  the  same  as  being  in  general  is  a  perverse  way  of  saying  that 
there  is  no  being  which  is  not  some  determinate  kind  of  being. 
Hegel  confuses  contrary  opposites  with  counterparts  or  differents. 
Identity  and  diversity,  for  instance,  or  wholeness  and  partness,  or 
particularity  and  universality,  are  not  contradictories  but  counter- 
parts. What  Hegel's  logic  proves  up  to  the  hilt  is,  not  that 
negativity  or  contradiction  is  the  moving  spring  or  reality  and 
thought,  but  that  every  determinate  being  or  existent  implies  an 
other.  As  Plato  puts  it,  being  partakes  of  the  "same"  and  the 
"other."  These  communicate  with  one  another.  For  example, 
yellow  is  neither  spherical  nor  juicy,  but  in  an  orange  each  of  these 
qualities,  which  is  an  other  of  the  others,  communicates  with  one 
another.  An  orange  is  not  an  orange  tree ;  the  tree  is  an  other  of 
the  other,  that  is,  the  orange,  but  the  tree  and  the  orange  are  inter- 
dependent existents.  Hegel  has  sufficiently  demonstrated  that 
reality  must  be  a  systematic  totality  of  related  elements,  and  not 
a  chaos  or  mere  aggregate.  If  the  principle  of  negativity  only 
means  that  the  nature  of  any  finite  existent,  when  thought  out  to 
the  end,  implies  that  any  existent  exists  only  in  relation  to  all  other 
existents,  and  that  the  whole  of  existence  is  a  system  of  related 
beings  or  elements,  we  may  accept  it.  But  negativity,  in  this 
sense,  is  not  contradiction,  and  we  cannot  by  its  aid  derive  all 
categories  from  mere  being.  I  shall  attempt  to  show  that  the 
primary  categories   are  interrelated,   or  communicate  with  one 


136  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

another.  I  shall  also  try  to  show  that,  if  we  start  with  the  simplest 
category,  that  of  quality,  there  is  a  development  of  categories  in 
pairs  which  are  united  in  higher  categories  until  we  come  to  the 
all-inclusive  category,  which  for  me  is  Order.  We  are  to  proceed 
from  the  simplest  and  poorest,  in  the  sense  of  the  least  meaningful 
category  to  the  most  comprehensive  category. 

It  has  become  fashionable  to  say  that,  whereas  particulars 
exist,  universals  subsist.  If  this  distinction  means  that  universals 
have  a  pervasive  and  permanent  sort  of  being  in  contrast  with  the 
local  and  temporary  being  of  the  particulars  which  they  relate, 
it  is  useful.  If  it  means  that  subsistence  is  some  ghostly  sort  of 
being  apart  from  the  concrete  reality  of  experience,  I  can  find 
neither  sense  nor  use  in  the  distinction.  The  subsistence  of  uni- 
versals means  to  me  their  substantial  existence — that  they  are  the 
all  pervading  and  ever  permanent  warp  of  reality  to  which 
empirical  particulars  are  the  woof. 

I  shall  consider,  in  the  following  eight  chapters,  the  meanings 
of  the  principal  categories  of  philosophical  thinking  in  their  appli- 
cations and  their  mutual  relationships.  I  shall  begin  with  the 
simplest  categories — those  of  quality. 


CHAPTER  X 

LIKENESS   AND    UNLIKENESS,    IDENTITY   AND   DIVEESITY 

The  qualities  of  experience,  which  are  the  raw  material  of  our 
knowledge  of  reality,  the  immediate  stuff  of  reality,  are  given 
through  the  senses.  Colors,  shapes,  massiveness,  temperatures, 
tastes,  smells,  kinesthetic  qualities,  pleasantness  and  unpleasant- 
ness— all  these  and  other  qualities  are  irreducible  sensa  data  or 
sense  of  reality.  Other  beings  with  sensory  equipments  other  than 
ours  would  have  different  data  of  reality.  For  example,  a  dog's 
world  is  doubtless  largely  made  up  of  smells. 

For  human  beings,  then,  the  immediate  stuff  of  reality  consists 
only  of  the  qualities  sensed  and  felt.  We  cannot  explain  why  we 
have  just  these  and  no  more  sense  qualities ;  but  the  mind  no  sooner 
begins  to  take  note  of  them  than  it  notes  that  there  are  degrees  and 
kinds  of  likeness  and  unlikeness.  The  various  colors,  for  example, 
are  alike  in  that  they  are  colors.  So  color  is  a  kind.  Colors  and 
sounds  are  so  unlike  that  they  are  different  kinds,  although  the 
fact  of  colored  audition,  if  it  be  a  fact,  suggests  that  possibly  they 
are  not  absolutely  different  kinds.  However,  for  the  normal  mind 
the  various  types  of  sensation  do  appear  to  be  different  kinds. 
Color  does  not  become  sound  or  taste  nor  vice  versa.  On  the  other 
hand,  a  light  differs  from  another  light,  a  sound  from  another 
sound,  an  acrid  taste  from  another  acrid  taste,  in  degree  or  in- 
tensity; thus  unlikeness  of  degree  differs  from  unlikeness  of  kind. 
For  the  comparison  of  sense  qualities  with  respect  to  degrees  and 
kinds  of  likeness  and  unlikeness  arise  the  categories  of  identity 
and  diversity,  both  qualitative  and  quantitative.  From  these  arise, 
in  turn,  the  categories  of  unity  and  plurality,  wholeness  and  part- 
ness,  continuity  and  discreteness,  substance  and  individuality. 

Likeness  is  partial  identity  of  quality ;  that  is,  generic  identity. 
A  kind  or  class  means  more  than  one  instance  of  a  type  of  existent 
which  constitutes  a  kind,  by  virtue  of  either  a  single  qualitative 
similarity  or  a  complex  of  similar  qualities.     Red  or  green  are 

137 


138  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

instances  of  simple  kinds,  dog  or  man  of  complex  kinds.  In  brief 
a  simple  likeness,  such  as  a  color,  spatial  form,  odor  or  taste,  is  the 
basis  of  a  simple  kind ;  a  complex  likeness  is  made  up  of  a  com- 
bination of  simple  likenesses,  as  for  example — orange,  apple  or 
dog.  The  ultimately  simple  kinds  are  based  on  the  not-further 
analyzable  differences  of  quality.  It  is  difficult  to  say  what  are 
simple  qualities ;  for  example,  is  red  really  a  simple  kind  or  are 
all  shades  of  red  different  simple  kinds?  When  we  say  that  a 
thing  is  in  a  class  by  itself  we  mean  that  there  is  only  one  instance 
of  the  kind,  and  strictly  speaking  we  are  dealing  not  with  an 
instance  of  a  kind  but  with  a  unique  individual.1 

The  distinction  of  degrees  within  the  same  qualitative  or 
generic  likeness  is  the  work  of  the  category  of  intensive  magnitude. 
It  has  been  denied  by  some  that  intensive  magnitudes,  such  as 
lights,  sounds,  or  pleasures  and  pains,  are  commensurable.  But 
surely  we  can  note  and  compare  differences  of  intensity !  If  one 
light  is  brighter  than  another  and  the  latter  than  a  third,  if  one 
pleasure  is  keener  than  another  and  the  latter  than  a  third,  surely 
we  are  measuring  lights  and  pleasures  in  terms  of  a  qualitatively 
identical  scale.  And  that  is  what  we  do  when  we  measure  lengths 
and  weights.  It  is  assumed  tacitly  by  those  who  admit  commen- 
surability  in  the  latter  cases,  and  deny  it  in  the  former,  that  in  the 
latter  cases  alone  we  have  absolute  fixity  of  scale ;  but  in  neither 
case  do  we  have  absolute  fixity.  Measures  of  length  and  mass  vary 
too;  only  they  vary  less  than  measures  of  light  or  pleasure-pain, 
since  the  data  of  sight  and  touch  are  relatively  more  constant  than 
the  data  of  light  and  affection. 

The  categories  of  number  and  of  spatial  relationships  are 
based  on  the  recognition  of  existential  identity  and  diversity. 
Because  there  are  empirically  different  qualities  and  complexes  of 
qualities  which  occupy  distinct  positions  in  space  and  time  (dis- 
tinct point-instants)  we  count,  and  because  distinct  particulars  or 
positions  persist  or  endure  together  we  relate  them  in  space  and 
we  enumerate  them.  Because  qualitatively  distinct  positions  suc- 
ceed one  another  in  time  we  order  them ;  through  superposition  we 
measure  spatial  magnitudes;  through  direction  or  "sense,"  in  its 
mathematical  meaning,  the  recognition  of  which  involves  time,  we 

1  Ultimately,  only  the  whole  system  of  the  universe  ean  be  a  wholly  unique 
individual.  Such  is  the  absolute  in  the  philosophy  of  Messrs.  Bradley  and 
Bosanquet. 


LIKENESS  AND   UNLIKENESS  139 

recognize  spatial  relations.  A  numerical  series  is  a  temporal  order 
of  direction  regarded  as  enduring  in  space.  All  our  most  complex 
and  abstruse  theorems  in  regard  to  number,  magnitude  and  quan- 
tity have  their  roots  in  the  empirical  facts  of  the  occupation  of 
space  in  successive  moments  of  time  by  particular  qualities  and 
complexes  of  qualities.  I  have  neither  the  time  nor  the  capacity 
to  show  in  detail  how  this  is  so,  but  I  may  sum  up  the  foregoing 
matter  as  follows.  Simple  or  complex  likenesses  of  qualitative 
particulars  occupying  distinct  positions  in  space  and  time  are  the 
basis  of  all  generic  relations  or  class  universals.  The  empirical 
differences  of  particulars  are  the  basis  of  number  and  quantity. 
The  empirical  relations  of  simultaneous  and  successive  existents 
are  the  basis  of  all  relating  through  unity,  plurality  and  totality. 

The  category  of  whole  and  part  deserves  some  mention.  The 
empirical  basis  of  wholeness  is  the  continuity  of  our  spatial  posi- 
tions in  time ;  in  other  words,  the  original  of  wholeness  is  a  spatial 
order  that  endures  unchanged  in  a  succession  of  temporal 
moments.  We  derive  partness  from  the  fact  that  we  recognize 
distinct  qualities  and  groups  of  qualities  as  permanently  occupying 
distinctive  positions  in  succeeding  moments  of  time.  Of  course 
we  distinguish  between  the  wholeness  of  a  spatial  continuum  and 
the  wholeness  of  an  organism  or  mind,  since  the  parts  of  the 
organism  and  still  more  of  the  mind  more  intimately  pervade  the 
whole  than  the  point-instants  of  space  and  time  pervade  the  whole 
of  space  and  time.  Thus  the  problem  arises  as  to  whether  an 
organism,  a  person  or  a  society  of  persons,  are  adequately  con- 
ceived in  terms  of  whole  and  part.  I  do  not  think  they  are,  but 
this  is  a  matter  for  discussion  later.  I  am  concerned  now  only  to 
insist  that  the  original  of  the  category  of  whole  and  part  is  to  be 
found  in  the  experience  of  space-time  as  a  continuum  which  in- 
cludes sensory  or  qualitative  distinctions  and  relations.2 

The  category  of  identity  and  its  correlative  diversity  are  used 
in  equivocal  and  misleading  senses.  We  must  distinguish  between 
generic  and  existential  identity.     If  two  particulars  were  abso- 

2 My  colleague,  Dr.  A.  R.  Chandler,  comments  as  follows:  "Taken  intro- 
spectively,  music  furnishes  simultaneous  wholes  without  spatiality;  it  fur- 
nishes 'sense'  as  one  tone  above  another  in  pitch,  without  temporal  succession 
or  space  arrangement.  The  spatiality  comes  in  through  the  empathetic  kin- 
aesthetic  sensations  and  images  aroused."  I  am  unable  to  separate,  in  my  own 
introspection,  the  kinesthetic  factors  from  the  pure  music;  but  then  I  am  a 
' '  duffer ' '  in  regard  to  music  and  he  may  very  well  be  right.  If  so,  there 
is  an  empirical  instance  of  whole-part  relation  without  space  or  time  elements. 


140  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

lutely  identical  in  quality  and  duration  they  would  not  be  two,  as 
Leibniz  pointed  out  in  his  principle  of  the  identity  of  indiscern- 
ibles.    Existential  identity  means  the  same  as  numerical  identity, 
and  the  miuimum  meaning  of  numerical  identity  is  existence  in 
at  least  one  moment  of  time  at  some  point  in  space.    Thus,  as  Mr. 
Alexander  argues  so  effectively,  reality  in  its  poorest  terms  consists 
at  least  of  point  instants  or  event  particles ;  that  is,  of  events  that 
occupy  positions  in  space.     Moreover,  in  order  that  an  existent 
may  be  identified  it  must  exist  for  at  least  two  moments  of  time  at 
a  point  in  space,  or  in  two  moments  of  time  occupy  two  related 
points  in  space.     Every  position  in  space  occupies  time  and  every 
instant  of  time  is  located  in  space.     Time  and  space,  as  we  shall 
see  later  on,  are  interdependent  totalities.     They  are  not  class- 
universals,  in  the  generally  accepted  sense  of  the  term,  but  wholes. 
An  existent  is  identical  with  itself  only  in  so  far  as  it  is  different 
from  other  existents,  and  vice  versa.     As  Plato  put  it,  the  same 
and  the  other  are  in  communication ;  or,   as  Hegel  argued  ad 
nauseam,  the  same  is  the  other  of  the  other.    In  short,  all  existents 
are  elements  in  the  systematic  totality  of  being.    Reality  is  a  whole 
made  up  of  parts  in  relation ;  the  parts  are  the  particular  existents ; 
the  relations  are  the  universals  by  which  the  particulars  have  mem- 
bership in  the  whole.     Thus  the  consideration  of  identity  and 
diversity  leads  us  into  the  consideration  of  particular,  universal 
and  individual,  unity  and  plurality,  continuity  and  discreteness, 
substance,  causality  and  reciprocity,  and  finally  into  that  of  the 
structure  or  order  of  the  universe.     Before  we  take  up  these  con- 
cepts it  is  desirable  to  clear  up  a  confusion  in  regard  to  identity 
and  diversity  which  is  found  in  the  literature  of  so-called  absolute 
idealism. 

In  the  writings  of  Messrs.  Bradley,  and  other  idealists  I  find 
a  subtle  fallacy,  which  consists  in  arguing  from  the  interrelated- 
ness  of  all  existents  to  their  existential  identity.  All  existents  are 
determinate  and  all  determination  involves  relation,  but  it  does  not 
follow  that  the  relatedness  of  all  existents  makes  them  parts  of  one 
being  that  is  both  numerically  and  qualitatively  self-identical. 
Suppose  we  assume  that  there  are  an  indefinite  number  of  empir- 
ically distinct  point-instants,  that  all  these  are  empirically  distinct 
centers  of  quality;  suppose  we  assume  further  that  some  of  these 
centers  have  the  qualities  of  vitality  and  sentience.  Let  us  grant 
further  that  all  our  assumed  centers  are  in  interaction  and  inter- 


LIKENESS  AND   UNLIKENESS  141 

passion ;  in  other  words  that  they  are  interdependent  parts  of  one 
whole — the  universe.  Let  us  assume  further  that  the  highest  con- 
ception we  can  frame  of  a  whole  is  that  of  a  mind  or  experience, 
does  it  follow  that  the  universe  must  be  one  mind  or  experience  ? 
Is  it  not  illegitimate  to  argue  from  the  systematic  character  of 
reality  as  a  whole  to  the  conclusion  that  reality  as  a  whole  is  both 
generically  and  numerically  one  self-identical  individual  ?  I  shall 
argue  later  on  for  the  doctrine  that  the  various  orders  in  reality 
constitute  a  hierarchy  which  probably  has  its  ground  in  a  supreme 
principle  of  order.  This  position  does  not  imply  that  all  existence 
is  both  qualitatively  and  numerically  one. 

The  problem  of  identity  and  diversity  has  thus  carried  us  into 
the  very  heart  of  metaphysics,  which  is  the  question  of  the  right 
relation  of  the  one  and  the  many — of  the  universe  and  its  mem- 
bers. In  recent  philosophy  this  question  has  taken  the  form — are 
relations  and  relata  independent  of  one  another  ?  Before  I  discuss 
this  question,  it  is  desirable  to  consider  the  relations  of  quantity 
and  quality. 


CHAPTER  XI 

QUANTITY   AND  QUALITY 

Since  our  purpose  here  is  to  consider  the  metaphysical  relations 
of  quantity  and  quality,  it  is  not  necessary  to  enter,  at  any  length, 
into  the  problems  of  logistic  or  mathematical  philosophy.1 

Number  and  spatial  magnitude  are  the  two  fundamental  forms 
of  quantity.  They  originated  in  man's  practical  desire  to  count 
his  possessions,  to  measure  land,  and  to  weigh  things.  Number 
and  magnitude  seem,  at  first  blush,  to  be  as  different  as  time  and 
space.  Indeed,  the  very  notion  of  number  involves  the  recognition 
of  a  temporal  series ;  counting  is  stringing  together,  in  the  con- 
sciousness of  an  orderly  series,  discrete  moments.  The  notion  of 
magnitude  involves  the  simultaneous  existence  and  persistence  of 
extended  parts;  a  bulk  or  mass  consists  of  co-existing  positions 
which  resist  occupation  by  anything  else.  But,  we  shall  see  later, 
space  and  time  are  interdependent  aspects  of  the  perceptual  world. 
The  measurement  of  magnitude  involves  number,  and  the  enumer- 
ation of  things  involves  spatial  reference.  Indeed,  while  arithme- 
tic and  geometry  at  first  may  have  developed  more  or  less  apart 
from  one  another,  the  progress  of  higher  mathematics  has  been  in 
the  arithmetizing  of  geometry.  Pythagoras  appears  to  have  begun 
this  work,  and,  in  the  course  of  it,  to  have  discovered  the  incom- 
mensurability, in  terms  of  natural  numbers,  of  the  side  and  the 
diagonal  of  a  square.  This  difficulty  led  to  the  invention  of  irra- 
tional numbers.  Coordinate  geometry  and  the  calculus  were  two 
great  steps  in  the  arithmetizing  of  spatial  magnitude  and  motion 
— that  is,  in  the  expression  of  continuous  wholes  in  terms  of  dis- 
crete magnitudes. 

Kant  said  that  number  arose  from  the  consciousness  of  the 


1  On  the  latter  subject,  see :  B.  Eussell,  Introduction  to  Mathematical  Phi- 
losophy ;  A.  N.  Whitehead,  Introduction  to  Mathematics;  Whitehead  and 
Eussell,  Principles  of  Mathematics ;  L.  Couturat,  The  Algebra  of  Logic;  P. 
Natorp,  Die  Logischen  Grundlagen  der  Exakten  Wissenschaften ;  H.  Poincare, 
Science  et  Methode. 

142 


QUANTITY  AND   QUALITY  143 

repetition  of  acts  of  attention;  in  other  words  from  counting 
things.  This  idea  has  been  criticized,  on  the  ground  that  it  is 
circular,  and  that  number  can  be  considered  apart  from  the  act  of 
enumeration.2  Number  is  defined  by  Russell,  following  Frege,  as 
follows:  "A  number  is  anything  which  is  the  number  of  some 
class" ;  and,  "The  number  of  a  class  is  the  class  of  all  classes  which 
are  similar  to  it";  "similarity  consists  of  one-one  correspondence 
between  the  classes";  thus  all  couples,  trios,  etc.,  are  in  one-one 
relation.  Number  thus  is  defined  in  terms  of  classes  and  one-one 
correspondence.  I  do  not  question  the  value  of  this  definition,  but 
it  presupposes  number  and  implies  enumeration  and  is  circular. 
For  "class"  implies  individual  members  or  particulars  which  have 
the  similarity  of  being  grouped  together  as  sharing  in  a  common 
relation.  Every  definition  of  number  is  circular,  and  we  really 
define  it  by  pointing  to  it. 

Number  is  essentially,  in  origin,  a  discrete  order,  or  one-in- 
many.  It  involves  the  consciousness  of  a  succession  of  acts  of 
attention.  Unity  is  an  abstraction  from  the  recognition  of  identity 
in  things  and  in  the  self  for  which  things  are  identical ;  plurality 
or  manyness  is  an  abstraction  from  the  consciousness  of  a  com- 
munity of  relation  among  distinct  identities,  by  virtue  of  which 
they  can  be  grouped  together  into  classes.  At  first  one  thing  was 
something  which  responded  in  some  fashion  to  a  single  interest; 
things  which  responded  to  several  interests  were  several ;  several 
things  which  responded  to  a  common  interest  were  one-in-many, 
were,  in  short,  a  number-group.  Thus  the  notion  of  number  arose 
from  the  recognition  of  identity  and  commiuiity  or  class-relation. 
A  group  is  an  assemblage  of  objects  bound  together  by  a  common 
interest  for  the  grouper;  whether  it  be  a  group  of  rational,  ir- 
rational or  transfinite  numbers,  or  a  group  of  dogs  or  sheep,  or 
a  group  of  things  whose  only  common  feature  is  that  they  are 
owned  by  the  grouper.  Thus  cardinal  number  is  derived  from 
ordinal  number,  and  the  latter  is  the  abstract  or  symbolical  ex- 
pression of  the  consciousness  of  the  orderly  series  of  thought  in 
repeating  and  summating  units  or  identical  entities.  Enumera- 
tion is  the  conscious  synthesis  of  the  series  of  acts  involved  in 
adding  and  subtracting  units.     All  operations  with  numbers  imply 

*See,  B.  Kussell,  Our  Knowledge  of  the  External  World,  pp.  187-189;  and 
Introduction  to  Mathematical  Philosophy,  chap.  2;  J.  W.  Young,  Fundamental 
Concepts  of  Algebra  and  Geometry,  p.  64  ff. 


144  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

the  judgments:  there  are  particulars  or  units  and  there  are 
identical  relations  between  these.  In  dealing  with  pure  number 
and  quantity  we  abstract  almost  entirely  from  the  qualitative 
heterogeneities  of  the  objects  of  thought ;  I  say  "almost  entirely," 
since  there  would  be  no  meaning  in  enumeration,  or  any  other 
operation  with  number,  if  we  did  not  recognize  the  distinctness 
or  particularity  of  each  symbol  and  its  corresponding  act  of  atten- 
tion. Just  as  in  determining  how  many  sheep  one  owns  one  can 
ignore  their  respective  sizes,  colors  and  sexes,  whereas  for  purposes 
of  breeding  or  marketing  one  cannot  ignore  those  differences,  so 
in  purely  arithmetical  and  algebraic  operations,  one  considers 
each  symbol  only  as  the  sign  of  an  act  of  thought.  What  cannot 
be  ignored,  if  number  and  numerical  operations  are  to  mean  any- 
thing definite,  is  that  a  number  is  a  discrete  moment  in  an  order 
series.  Thus  a  number  series  is  the  most  abstract  symbolical  ex- 
pression of  a  temporal  order,  just  as  measurements  of  spatial  mag- 
nitude are  the  most  abstract  expressions  of  spatial  order.  Of 
course  the  symbols  which  represent  the  number  series  can  be  seen 
or  thought  as  existing  simultaneously  or  in  space.  Whether  we 
can  count  without  imagining  movement  in  space  (M.  Bergson  says 
that  we  cannot,  and  Mr.  Russell  that  we  can),  at  any  rate  we  can 
apply  number  to  space,  and  we  do  measure  in  time. 

The  invention  of  symbols  for  whole  numbers,  fractions,  nega- 
tive, irrational  and  complex  numbers,  has  made  possible  notable 
advances  in  number  theory,  and  in  the  applications  of  mathematics 
to  practical  problems.  Number  is  objective  as  an  expression  of 
the  objective  constitution  of  thought.  The  most  complex  number 
series,  assemblages  and  groups,  the  whole  development  of  modern 
number  theory,  is  a  beautiful  example  of  the  fact  that  thought 
has  a  determinate  constitution.  Starting  out  from  specific  defi- 
nitions and  assumptions  it  finds  definite  logical  consequences  to 
follow  from  its  starting  points.  Thus  pure  mathematics  becomes 
identical  with  symbolical  or  purely  formal  logic.  Its  entire  su- 
perstructure is  built  on  the  consequences  that  follow  from  the  na- 
ture of  its  symbols  and  assumptions.  The  universal  nature  of 
thought,  to  which  we  must  conform  if  we  wish  to  think  logically, 
is  revealed  in  pure  mathematics  which  is  the  play  of  pure  thought 
conducted  according  to  the  rules  of  the  game.3 

1  But  when  we  are  told  that  there  are  transfinite  numbers,  or  infinite 
number  in  which  a  part  is  equal  to  the  whole,  or  in  which  the  addition  or 


QUANTITY  AND   QUALITY  145 

A  number  series  that  was  an  absolute  continuum  would  be 
as  senseless  as  a  sand-rope  series ;  for  the  essence  of  every  number 
series  is  that  it  is  a  discrete  series.  In  this,  the  simplest  and  most 
fundamental  form  of  human  thinking,  is  expressed  the  basic  prob- 
lem that  lies  at  the  heart  of  all  human  thinking  and  intelligent 
action — the  problem  of  the  relation  between  the  discrete  or  par- 
ticular and  the  continuous  or  total.  If  we  ask  what  is  the  rela- 
tion between  identity  and  diversity,  the  many  and  the  one,  the 
particular  and  the  universal,  the  individual  and  the  social  order, 
personality  and  the  universe,  the  changing  and  the  permanent; 
we  are  posing  special  aspects  and  phases  of  the  one  fundamental 
question — how  to  reconcile  discreteness  and  continuity,  individ- 
uality and  order,  in  theory,  practice,  or  contemplative  vision. 
Pythagoras  was  not  so  far  astray  when  he  said  that  numbers  are 
the  essences  of  things.  The  final  question  of  all  philosophical 
theory  is  the  meaning  of  order;  the  bottom  problem  of  the  prac- 
tical life  of  the  human  person  is  the  true  nature  of  social  order; 


subtraction   of   a  number   makes   no   difference   to   the  size   of  the  number, 
that  is  to  the  number  of  units  contained  in  it  we  are  asked  to  abandon  the 
notion  of  number  in   its  usual  meaning.     If  mathematics  be  not  the  science 
of  number  and  quantity,  then  it  is  high  time  that  some  other  name  were  found 
for  the  latter  science.     Inasmuch  as,  historically  and  by  general  social  usage, 
mathematics  is  the  science  of  number  and  quantity,  it  seems  to  me  that  it 
would  be  much  less  confusing  and  misleading  to  call  the  new  science  logistic 
or  symbolic  logic.     I  am  unable  to  understand  a  number  that  is  a  part  of 
another  number  and  yet  is  equal  in  number  to  that  number  of  which  it  is  a  part. 
With   all  due   admiration   for   the   profoundly   and   ingenuity  of  Messrs. 
Cantor,  Dedekind,   Russell,  et  al.,  it  seems  to  me  that  their  transfinites,  in- 
finites contained  within  infinites  without  number,  but  in  which  the  containers 
and   contained   are   equal   because   they  are   in  one-one   correspondence,   their 
continuities  which  are  not  continuous  since  number  is  essentially  discrete,  have 
contributed   to    obfuscation    of   thought   concerning   mathematics   and   number 
and  quantity.     Numbers  have  functioned  in  the  history  of  culture  as,  discrete 
symbolic   expressions  for  discrete  series  of  acts  of  thought,  by  which  things 
of  all  sorts  can  be  enumerated  or  added  and  substracted,  by  which  men  can 
carry  on  barter  and  can  better  operate  on  the  physical  conditions  of  life; 
and  which,  beyond  these  practical  uses,  afford  the  human  mind  opportunity 
for  the   development   of   precise   and  rigorous  habits  of  thinking.    The  con- 
fusion between  the  older  science  of  number  and  quantity  and  the  new  theorieB 
of  the  infinite  and  of  a  mathematics  which  dispenses  with  enumeration  and 
quantity,   and   thus   becomes   a   purely   abstract    and   formal   logic   of   terms, 
propositions  and  relations,   lends  color  to   Mr.  Russell's  definition— "Mathe- 
matics is  the  science  in  which  we  never  know  what  we  are  talking  about,  nor 
whether  what  we  say  is  true"  (Mysticism  and  Logic,  p.  75).  Mr.  Russell  identi- 
fies mathematics  with  formal  logic.    It  deals  entirely  with  hypothetical  propo- 
sitions and  sheds  no  light  on   the  nature  of  the  actual  world.     "Geometry 
throws  no  light  on  the  nature  of  space,"   and,  I  am  tempted  to  add,  the 
new  infinite  throws  no  light  on  the  nature  of  number.     (See  Appendix  to 
Chap.  35,  "On  the  Infinite.") 


146  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

in  both  fields  the  concept  of  order  is  the  solution  of  the  question 
as  to  the  right  relation  between  the  discrete  and  the  continuous, 
the  individual  and  the  universe;  the  practical  question  is  insolu- 
ble, if  the  philosophical  foundations  be  ignored.  (The  chief 
trouble  with  civilization  to-day  is  that  neither  those  who  are  try- 
ing to  alter  it  radically,  nor  those  who  wish  to  return  to  a  "state 
of  normalcy,"  have  any  thought-out  philosophy.  Until  rulers 
become  philosophers,  righteousness  will  not  prevail.) 

Quantity  is  a  relation.  It  depends  upon  quality,  which  is 
the  stuff  of  reality.  Number  implies  that  there  are  particular 
identities,  self-identical  things,  so  that  each  is  a  unit  or  contains 
the  unit.  Any  number  is  defined  by  its  place  in  a  number  system. 
Thus  numbers  are  symbols  of  sets  of  logical  relations.  Spatial 
magnitude  is  the  relation  of  a  given  spatial  configuration  or  bit 
of  space  to  conventionally  established  units  of  length,  area,  volume. 
The  same  holds  true  of  weight  and  mass.  In  every  case  a  quantity 
is  the  relation  of  given  simple  qualities  such  as  extensity,  move- 
ment and  mass,  in  a  conventionalized  system  of  relations.  Every 
actual  quantity  is  relative  to  a  system  and  every  system  is  a  con- 
vention. All  quantitative  relations  are  based  on  comparisons  of 
quality;  for  example,  the  measurement  of  lengths  and  areas  pre- 
supposes sameness  of  extensive  quality;  and  empirical  extensity 
is  a  simple  quality,  like  color  or  sound.  More  and  less,  in  degrees 
of  intensive  magnitude,  are  simple  cases  of  comparison  of  differ- 
ences in  the  same  quality.  Thus  two  extensive  magnitudes  are 
greater  and  less,  respectively,  because  they  are  differences  in  the 
same  quality;  extensities  differ  in  intensive  magnitude,  and  vice 
versa.  Spread  a  color  or  a  sound  over  a  larger  area  and  it  be- 
comes thinner  or  weaker  in  intensity;  condense  it  and  it  becomes 
more  intense.  Extensity  and  intensity,  the  spatial  and  temporal 
factors  of  experience,  are  inseparable.  But  quantity  is  a  relation 
of  quality.  Therefore,  only  in  so  far  as  there  is  homogeneity  of 
quality  between  them  can  things  be  measured  in  the  strict  sense. 
Colors  cannot  be  measured  in  terms  of  sound,  nor  pleasures  in 
terms  of  spatial  extensity.  We  may  say,  figuratively,  that  one 
pleasure  is  more  voluminous  than  another,  but  we  cannot  compare 
them  in  terms  of  cubic  centimeters.  Intelligences  can  be  meas- 
ured in  terms  of  other  intelligences,  but  not  in  terms  of  physical 
extent  or  weight.  In  so  far  as  spatial  extensity  is  homogeneous 
we  can  compare  and  measure  its  parts,  by  putting  one  alongside, 


QUANTITY  AND  QUALITY  147 

upon,  or  inside  another.  This  can  be  done  because  extensity  is 
persistent.  But  we  cannot,  in  the  same  manner,  measure  qualities 
which  are  essentially  temporal;  such  as  pleasures  or  psychical 
values.  In  so  far  as  experiential  or  lived  time  is  heterogeneous 
we  cannot  compare  exactly  its  successive  moments.  We  measure 
lived  time  only  by  distorting  it  into  rhythmical  space-movements ; 
thus  reducing  the  heterogeneity  of  experienced  change  to  the 
homogeneity  of  repeated  identical  movements  in  space.  Meas- 
urement of  the  living  succession  of  experiences  assumes  that  all 
change  or  duration  is  a  succession  of  generically  identical  mo- 
ments, which  is  not  true.  If  the  successive  moments  of  experi- 
enced duration  or  change  were  really  identical  in  character,  there 
would  be  no  recognition  of  change.  To  M.  Bergson  belongs  the 
merit  of  having  brought  this  truth  out  clearly,  in  the  first  two 
chapters  of  Time  and  Free  Will,  although  it  has  been  known  since 
Leibniz. 

All  precise  measurement  presupposes  that  the  parts  of  space 
measured  differ  only  in  relative  positions  and  extents;  and 
ignores  the  question  whether  differences  of  position  and  extent 
can  coexist  without  further  qualitative  differences.  Empirically 
there  are  no  pure  positions,  areas,  lengths  and  volumes.  From 
the  point  of  view  of  concrete  experience  all  measurements  must 
be  regarded  as  useful  fictions;  the  fundamental  positions  and 
volumes  are  qualitatively  diverse  and  ever  changing.  Reality 
consists  of  groupings  of  unique  qualitative  positions  or  event- 
particles,  and  quantitative  comparisons  are  skeletal  schemes  of 
their  relations.  I  do  not  mean  that  the  relations  are  unreal,  but 
that  the  empirical  complexes  of  qualities  are  substantive  whereas 
the  relations  are  transitive.  I  employ  the  word  "transitive"  here 
in  the  sense  in  which  James  uses  it ;  namely,  the  substantive  ele- 
ments in  experience  consist  of  the  resting  places  of  thought, 
the  relata  or  transitive  elements,  consist  of  the  transitions.  In 
the  terminology  of  the  newer  logic  only  those  relations  are  transi- 
tive by  which  one  can  pass  from  one  term  to  another  through  the 
mediation  of  a  third ;  for  example,  if  A  implies  B  and  B  implies 
C  in  the  same  system  of  relations  then  the  relation  is  transitive 
since  A  implies  C.  There  is  danger  of  confusion  in  the  use  of  the 
phrase  "transitive  relation."  James  uses  it  as  a  term  of  psycho- 
logical description  for  the  passage  of  the  mind ;  the  new  logic  uses 
it  as  the  basis  of  true  inference  in  place  of  the  Dictum  de  omni 


148  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

et  nullo.  Obviously  the  latter  usage  involves  the  problem  of  the 
metaphysical  status  of  relations,  which  I  consider  in  Chapters  XII 
and  XIV. 

While  the  extensity-faetor  of  experiences  is  the  only  one  that 
can  be  directly  measured,  since  only  extensity  can  be  accurately 
matched  with  extensity,  the  other  qualities  of  experience  can  be 
measured  indirectly,  by  comparison.  Even  pleasures  and  pains 
and  other  emotional  processes  can  be  compared  with  respect  to 
their  intensities  and  durations.  Thus,  while  the  intensity  of 
psychical  processes  are  not  measurable  in  terms  of  spatial  units, 
and  while  as  numerical  units  no  two  of  them  need  be  exactly  alike 
and  therefore  they  furnish  no  units  of  measurement  within  their 
own  kind,  they  are  comparable  and,  thus  far,  measurable.  There 
are  changes  in  the  qualitative  characters  of  psychical  processes 
which  are  in  one-one  correspondence  with  quantitative  changes 
in  the  stimuli;  colors  and  sounds  change  in  quality  with  changes 
in  the  rate  and  amplitude  of  the  motion  of  their  physical  occa- 
sions ;  so  do  tastes  and  smells ;  pleasures  and  pains  vary  with  the 
intensity  factors  of  the  stimuli.  The  Weber-Fechner  law  of  the 
relation  between  intensity  of  stimulation  and  of  sense-experience 
is  an  attempt  to  generalize  these  facts.  Its  interpretation  is  dis- 
puted and  we  need  not  discuss  the  point  here,  beyond  saying  that 
its  meaning  is  probably  chiefly  physiological,  although  attention 
lowers  the  threshold  of  consciousness  for  sensations.  Our  very 
feeling  of  personal  identity,  our  central  mass  of  systemic  feeling 
or  coenaesthesis,  is  changed  by  the  alteration  of  the  fundamental 
rhythms  of  our  bodily  life,  such  as  the  rate  of  the  heartbeat, 
breathing,  etc.  Since  the  empirical  qualities  of  both  our  per- 
ceptual world  and  our  felt  selfhood  change  with  changes  in  the 
velocities  of  physical  stimuli,  why  not  go  farther,  as  a  material- 
istic metaphysic  does,  and  say  that  all  the  qualitative  diversities 
of  the  empirical  world  are  nothing  but  differences  in  the  spatial 
configurations  and  velocities  of  the  motions  of  mass  particles  ?  To 
do  this  is  to  reduce  the  empirical  world  to  variations  in  the 
spatial  relations  of  elements  possessing  no  other  qualitative  dis- 
tinctions than,  let  us  say,  differences  in  electric  sign  and  mass. 
This  is  the  ideal  of  quantitative  science,  expressed  in  Lord  Kel- 
vin's saying:  "What  we  can  measure,  we  can  know."  On  which 
I  would  comment  that,  from  the  point  of  view  of  totality,  meas- 
urement gives  only  the  bare  bones  of  reality.    The  most  significant 


QUANTITY  AND   QUALITY  149 

and  worthful  qualities  of  experience  we  cannot  measure  directly, 
but  we  do  know  them.  All  differences  of  quality  are  not  reduci- 
ble to  differences  of  extensive  and  vector  quantity.  The  world 
of  living  experience  has  many  unique  and  absolute  differences  of 
quality  and  hence  of  value — of  pleasure,  pain,  happiness,  sorrow, 
beauty,  grandeur,  terror,  love,  joy. 

Experience  is  the  primary  reality,  and  in  it  we  cannot  pass 
from  one  order  of  quality  to  another  without  taking  account  both 
of  the  qualitative  complexity  of  the  experient,  which  is  for  us 
an  ultimate  or  primary  fact,  as  well  as  of  qualitative  differences 
in  the  stimuli.  Nature  apart  from  the  percipient  is  not  of  one 
quality,  or  even  a  few.  The  percipient  is  a  specific  and  complex 
reactor.  Even  in  the  same  order,  for  example,  in  colors,  sounds 
or  tastes,  each  discriminable  experience  is  qualitatively  unique. 
We  cannot  always  say  how  much  of  this  uniqueness  is  to  be  at- 
tributed to  the  percipient  and  how  much  to  differences  in  the 
stimulating  media.  And,  certainly,  in  the  inner  or  feeling  life 
of  the  percipient  each  experience  is  unique ;  here,  as  everywhere, 
only  differents  are  comparable.  Similarities,  comparisons  in 
degree  and  kind,  are  relative  and  vary,  according  to  the  stand- 
point and  purpose  of  the  comparer. 

To  reduce  all  differences  of  quality  to  differences  of  quantity 
would  be  to  eliminate  all  substantive  elements  from  experience, 
and,  with  them,  the  experient  himself.  But  the  human  self,  the 
living  experient,  is  a  creative  organism,  which  educes  from  the 
microscopic  mechanisms  of  the  physical  world,  as  conceived  by 
the  scientist,  all  the  rich  and  multiform  and  tingling  variety — 
shapes,  colors,  sounds,  tastes,  odors,  beauties,  grandeurs,  friend- 
linesses and  terrors — which  it  perceives  in  nature.  Walter  Pater 
says,  "Color  is  a  spirit  upon  things  by  which  they  become  expres- 
sive to  the  spirit."  4  Every  quality  that  man  perceives  in  nature 
is  a  spirit  upon  things  by  which  they  become  expressive  to  his 
spirit.  And  a  nature  that  is  thus  expressive  to  the  spirit,  and 
which  we  may  well  believe  has  many  more  capacities  of  expres- 
sion to  the  spirit  attuned  thereto  (as,  indeed,  we  know,  in  the 
case  of  poet,  artist  and  nature-lover)  is  not  a  skeleton  or  frame- 
work of  quantitative  relations  which  the  spirit  of  man  drapes 


* ' '  Essays  on  the  Renaissance, ' '  p.  63,  quoted  by  Mr.  Bosanquet,  Principle 
of  Individuality  and  Value,  p.  63. 


150  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

with  hallucinatory  garments  and  endows  with  an  illusory  life. 
The  wealth  of  empirical  qualities  which  the  spirit  of  man  educes 
from  a  nature  responsive  to  his  nature  must  be  expressive  of  a 
qualitative  wealth  and  variety  of  activity  and  life  in  a  universe 
that  is  richer,  not  poorer,  than  nature  as  man  perceives  and 
images  it.  Quantity  is  relation — a  relation  of  order  and  mag- 
nitude among  realities  that  are  revealed  as  energy  and  life  in  the 
substantive  qualities  of  experience. 


CHAPTER  XII 


KELATIONS 


The  problem  of  relations  has  been  a  storm  center  in  recent 
philosophy.  The  problem  is  this :  What  is  the  most  intelligible  or 
consistent  conception  of  the  relations  between  things  or  individua  ? 
In  the  language  of  James,  relations  are  commonly  regarded  as 
the  transitive  parts  of  experience  and  things  or  existents  as  the 
substantive  parts  of  experience.  This  is  because  the  recognition 
of  a  relation  involves  a  mental  transition  from  one  thing  to  an- 
other. In  this  mental  transition  we  may  misconceive  the  real 
relations  between  things;  but,  inasmuch  as  every  judgment  in- 
volves a  twofold  relation,  namely,  the  relation  of  things  judged  to 
be  in  relation  to  one  another  and  the  relation  of  the  judging  mind 
to  the  whole  matter  of  the  judgment,  there  can  be  truth  only  in 
so  far  as  the  second  relation  is  the  apprehension  of  the  first 
relation.  It  follows  that  relations  must  be  just  as  real  as  the 
things  which  they  relate.  Indeed,  when  we  consider  relations  in 
themselves  or  in  abstracto,  as  universals,  they  seem  much  more 
permanent  than  things.  Things  may  come  and  things  may  go 
but  relations  go  on  forever.  Aboveness,  belowness,  greaterness, 
equality,  beforeness,  afterness,  causality,  wholeness,  partness, 
paternity,  ownership,  lovingness,  etc. — such  universals  are  rela- 
tions which  appear  to  have  an  eternally  subsistent  being  apart 
from  the  muddy  and  transitory  stuff  of  empirical  existents  be- 
tween which  they  hold.  In  view  of  the  difficulties  involved  in 
forming  an  intelligible  conception  of  the  world  as  a  system  or 
totality  of  existents  in  relation,  the  easiest  solution  might  appear 
to  be  the  doctrine  that  things  or  existents  and  relations  are  wholly 
external  to  one  another — that  relations  "subsist"  eternally,  like  the 
Platonic  Ideas  in  the  common  version,  and  that  particular 
existents  come  and  go,  enter  into  and  pass  out  of  relations,  without 
their  natures  being  changed.  Such  is  the  doctrine  of  logical 
pluralism  or  logical  atomism. 

151 


152  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

I  shall  maintain  the  doctrine  that  relations  have  only  a  mental 
existence  apart  from  things,  and  that  in  reality  things  exist  only 
in  relation  and  relations  are  real  only  between  things.  In  other 
words,  reality  is  a  systematic  whole  of  existents  in  multitudinous 
relations.  A  thing  is  neither  the  mere  sum  of  its  relations  nor 
something  indifferent  to  its  relations.  There  are  relations  which 
are  irrelevant,  or  extrinsic,  as  Mr.  S.  Alexander  puts  it,  to  the 
nature  of  the  existents,  so  far  as  we  can  see.  For  example,  it  is 
irrelevant  to  my  nature,  so  far  as  I  know,  just  how  many  particles 
of  dust  there  are  in  the  atmosphere  of  Sirius,  if  Sirius  have  an 
atmosphere.  On  the  other  hand,  my  family,  community,  cultural, 
and  professional  relations  are  very  relevant  to  my  nature.  In 
other  such  relations,  I  would  be  other  than  I  am,  and  if  I  were 
other  than  I  am,  I  would  be  in  other  such  relations.  No  existent 
could  exist  out  of  the  relations  in  which  it  exists  and  continue 
to  be  itself.  All  things  are  related  in  some  way,  but  not  every- 
thing equally  to  everything  else.  Some  relations  between  existents 
are  negligible,  when  we  are  considering  the  natures  of  the  exist- 
ents, and  there  are  many  degrees  of  relevancy  in  relations.  It 
is  not  very  relevant  to  the  nature  of  my  pipe  whether  it  is  now 
on  my  desk  or  in  my  pocket,  but  it  is  relevant  to  its  nature 
whether  it  is  often  alight  and  filled  with  tobacco  and  in  my  mouth. 
The  world  contains  an  indefinite  plurality  of  existents  in  an  in- 
definite multitude  of  relations  of  varying  degrees  of  intimacy. 
There  are  static  relations  in  space,  dynamic  relations  in  space  and 
time,  relations  of  value  between  sentient  beings  and  their  physical 
and  social  environments,  affectional  and  moral  relations  between 
selves  in  society,  etc.  All  relevant  relations  are  dynamic,  that 
is,  they  involve  transactions  between  the  things  related.  All  things 
have  at  least  spatial  and  temporal  relations.  Such  relations  may 
or  may  not  be  relevant  to  the  nature  of  the  things — for  instance 
I  do  not  know  whether  the  fact  that  the  flavor  of  champagne  and 
the  square  root  of  minus  one  are  both  constituents  of  this  spatial 
and  temporal  world  means  that  they  have  any  relevant  relation- 
ship, but  I  do  know  that  there  is  a  relevant  relationship  between 
the  eighteenth  amendment  to  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States 
and  the  flavor  of  champagne — to  wit,  the  flavor  of  champagne  is 
vanishing  with  the  champagne. 

There  are  two  alternatives  to  the  doctrine  that  the  real  world 
consists  of  dynamic  things  in  dynamic  relations.    These  are:    (1) 


RELATIONS  153 

the  singularistic  or  monistic  doctrine  that  all  relations  are  more  or 
less  illusory  appearances  and  that  reality  consists  of  one  super- 
relational  being,  the  absolute;  and  (2)  the  pluralistic  doctrine  that 
reality  is  not  a  system  or  cosmos  at  all,  but  that  it  consists  of  a 
collection  of  various  things  and  various  relations  that  have  being 
independent  of  one  another ;  in  short,  is  a  multitude  of  Leibnizian 
monads  without  the  preestablished  harmony. 

Thus,  the  problem  of  relations  brings  to  a  head  the  funda- 
mental issue  that  lives  at  the  roots  of  all  metaphysical  questions, 
that  is  basic  to  the  problem  of  the  place  of  personality  in  the  world 
order — in  what  sense  is  the  world  of  reality  one  or  a  universe? 
Is  our  so-called  universe  merely  an  aggregate  or  collection  of 
various  entities,  as  the  extreme  pluralist  holds  ?  Is  it  ultimately 
one  being  inclusive  of  everything  real,  as  the  extreme  singularist 
holds  ?  Or  is  it  a  system  or  order  of  elements  in  relation ;  and,  if 
so,  in  what  sort  or  sorts  of  ultimate  relation?  Using  the  term 
"entity"  for  whatsoever  may  be  a  constituent  of  reality,  and  the 
term  "relation"  for  all  sorts  of  connections  between  entities,  I 
shall  now  discuss  this  problem. 

Modern  metaphysical  idealism  or  spiritualism,  since  Fichte 
and  Hegel,  has  for  the  most  part  been  singularistic  or  numerically 
monistic.  Indeed  singularistic  or  monistic  idealism  goes  back  to 
Spinoza,  the  first  great  singularist  of  modern  philosophy.  Sin- 
gularistic idealism  or  spiritualism  argues  that,  since  everything 
finite  is,  both  with  respect  to  its  being  known  and  its  existence, 
related  to,  and  therefore  dependent  upon,  an  other-than-itself ; 
therefore  all  finite  entities  can  exist  only  as  members  of  a  single 
all-including  whole — the  many  can  exist  as  many  only  in  the  one, 
the  differents  or  others  can  be  a  system  only  if  they  are  constituents 
of  the  unity.  Therefore  the  only  alternative  to  chaos,  the  only  way 
in  which  we  can  get  a  cosmos,  is  to  suppose  that  the  whole  system 
of  real  entities  is,  ultimately  regarded,  one  perfect  all-inclusive 
being.  And  the  only  adequate  sample  or  type  of  such  being  is  to 
be  found  in  a  mind,  self  or  personality;  or,  at  least  (as  Bradley 
puts  it)  a  perfect  experience.  Singularistic  idealists  are  not 
agreed  as  to  whether  the  absolute  one  can  be  considered  a  self- 
conscious  self  or  personality.  They  are  agreed  that  it  is  of  the 
nature  of  mind ;  since  in  Mind  is  to  be  found  the  only  true  type  of 
unity-expressing-and-realizing-itself-in-a-system-of-differences,  and 
maintaining  its  oneness  in  the  whole  related  system  of  mutually 


154  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

complementary  and  conditioning  finite  others.1  I  need  not  ex- 
pound this  argument  further,  since  I  shall  recur  to  it  later,  in 
discussing  the  nature  of  consciousness. 

The  pluralist  denies  the  validity  of  this  argumentation.  The 
neorealistic  pluralist,  in  particular,  calls  in  question  the  validity 
of  the  argument  from  the  ubiquity  of  the  knowledge  relation  (the 
egocentric  predicament)  ;  namely,  that,  since  everything  known 
is  in  relation  to  a  knower,  therefore  to  say  anything  about  anything 
or  about  everything  we  must  admit  that  its  being  is  dependent  on 
a  knower  or  mind.  If  this  argument  be  invalid,  then  entities  may 
be  in  all  sorts  of  relation  without  their  totalness  being  dependent 
on  a  mind.  If  knowing  need  make  no  difference  to  the  existence 
of  the  entities  known,  then  the  latter  may  constitute  some  sort  of 
universe  or  system  without  the  system  being  mind-constituted  or 
dependent.  The  relations  between  things  are  just  as  much  natural 
facts  as  the  empirical  qualities  of  the  things.  No  one  type  of 
relation  can  be  regarded  as  ultimately  constitutive  of  the  char- 
acter of  the  cosmos. 

It  follows  that  no  one  type  of  finite  existence  can  be  regarded 
as  furnishing  an  adequate  example  for  interpreting  the  nature  of 
the  cosmos.  In  fact,  the  cosmos  cannot  have  a  homogeneous 
nature;  it  must  be  a  plurality  of  existents  with  a  plurality  of 
qualities ;  it  cannot  be  either  one  self  or  experience,  or  a  society  of 
selves.  The  neo-realistic  pluralisms  contentions,  if  accepted, 
negative  both  singularistic  or  monistic  and  personalistic  or  plural- 
istic spiritualism.2  The  doctrines  of  Hegel,  Leibniz  and  Berkeley 
are  equally  untenable.  Reality  must  consist  of  many  kinds  of 
entity  in  many  kinds  of  relationship. 

The  central  and  critical  tenet  of  extreme  pluralism  is  that 
entities  and  relations  are  independently  real — have  being  external 
to  one  another.  For,  once  we  grant  that  entities  can  stand  in  no 
relations  without  thereby  suffering  modification,  we  have  com- 
mitted ourselves  either  to  a  chaotic  doctrine  of  reality  or  to  a  line 
of  reasoning  that  will  land  us  in  some  form  of  singularistic  ideal- 
ism if  we  go  through  to  the  end.    Neither  materialism  nor  dualism 


1  Such  is  the  general  line  of  argumentation  in  Fichte,  Hegel,  Green, 
Bradley,  E.  Caird,  Bosanquet  and  Boyce.  A  neat  condensation  thereof  will 
be  found  in  M.  W.  Calkins,  The  Persistent  Problems  of  Philosophy,  3d  Edi- 
tion, pp.  417-456,  cf.  also  Taylor's  Elements  of  Metaphysics,  Chap.  2. 

2  For  reasons  which  I  will  state  presently,  I  regard  singularistic  or  mon- 
istic personal  idealism  as  a  contradictio  in  adjecto. 


RELATIONS  155 

can  afford  us  a  coherent  conception  of  how  the  many  can  be  many 
entities  and  yet  be  elements  in  one  organic  or  hyperorganic  system 
— materialism  cannot,  since  it  must  oscillate  between  a  chaotic 
atomism  and  a  continuism  in  which  all  differences  of  quality  and 
individuality  are  wiped  out;  dualism  cannot,  since,  by  its  very 
terms,  the  universe  is  cut  in  two  with  a  hatchet. 

The  pluralist  contends  that,  fundamentally,  there  are  two  kinds 
of  being,  differing  with  respect  to  their  logical  and  epistemological 
status — concrete  entities  or  particulars,  which  exist;  and  univer- 
sals  or  generals,  which  subsist  or  are  valid.  All  relations,  taken  as 
such,  are  universals.  Thus,  for  example,  likeness,  equality,  great- 
erness,  lessness,  wholeness,  partness,  Tightness,  leftness,  have  sub- 
sistent  being  apart  from  the  concrete  existents  that  are  like,  equal, 
greater,  less,  whole,  part,  right,  left,  in  relation  to  other  entities. 
The  concrete  existents  may,  as  known  or  experienced,  enter  into 
such  relations  as  the  above  are  examples  of,  and  thus  be  qualified 
by  the  subsistent  universals  in  question;  and  may  in  turn  make 
their  exit  from  the  relations,  without  having  their  natures  modi- 
fied thereby.  The  existents  retain,  through  all  the  changes  and 
chances  of  their  mortal  lives  as  known,  their  existent  being;,  and 
the  universals  retain  their  subsistent  being,  no  matter  what  they 
qualify.  They  suffer  no  sea  change  "into  something  rich  and 
strange,"  by  becoming  or  ceasing  to  be  objects  of  experience.3 
Since,  then,  experience  or  knowing  makes  no  difference  to  the 
natures  of  many  of  its  objects,  the  ground  is  cut  from  under  all 
philosophies  that  would  build  up  a  theory  of  reality  by  an  analysis 
and  re-synthesis  of  the  nature  of  experience,  as  belonging  to  an 
experient,  at  the  very  start.  The  objective  idealist  is  knocked 
clean  off  his  pins.  He  is  left  without  even  one  leg  to  stand  on. 
(Xeorealistic  pluralism  harks  back  to  Plato,  for  its  august 
parentage.    Whether  its  claim  is  legitimate  I  cannot  here  discuss.) 

It  is  self-evident  to  me  that  relations  or  universals  can  have  no 
subsistent  (or  any  other  sort  of)  being,  in  abstraction  or  separation 
from  concrete  reality,  except  as  thoughts  in  some  mind.  Apart 
from  concrete  physical  reality,  on  the  one  hand,  and  minds,  on 
the  other  hand,  they  have  not  even  ghostly  subsistence;  for  there 
is  nothing  for  them  to  subsist  on  or  in.    Universals  exist  in  reality 

*  Professor  Spaulding  explains  how  this  proposition  or  thesis  is  established 
by  analysis  in  situ.  I  have  neither  the  temerity  nor  the  space  to  state  his 
explanation.     I  refer  the  reader  to  his  The  New  Rationalism,  passim. 


156  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

only  as  the  texture  of  connections  among  concrete  entities.  They 
are  simply  the  ways  in  which  existents  resemble  and  differ,  quali- 
tatively and  quantitatively,  act  on  and  suffer  from  one  another. 

It  is  equally  self-evident  to  me  that  no  concrete  existent  can 
exist  absolutely  out  of  relation  to,  and  independent  of,  all  others ; 
except  the  whole  universe  of  reality  which,  by  definition  or  con- 
ception being  the  totality  of  being,  is  the  self-existent  totality  of 
existents-in-relation,  to  which  all  existents-in-relation,  and,  there- 
fore, all  entities  and  relations  are  internal. 

But  is  it,  therefore,  necessary  to  conclude  that  there  must  be 
one  ground  or  medium  of  all  relations  between  finite  entities  ?  Is 
it  not  sufficient  to  suppose  that  the  systematic,  coherent  or  orderly 
character  of  the  cosmos  (in  so  far  as  there  is  a  cosmos,  since  we  do 
not  know  how  much  cosmos  or  order  there  may  ultimately  be)  is 
due  simply  to  the  fact  that  the  many  existents  which  make  up  the 
universe  are  in  all  sorts  of  relations  to  one  another  ?  Do  we  need 
any  more  unity  than  that  of  changing,  growing  and,  perhaps  in 
spots,  decaying,  immediate  rapports  between  elemental  existents  ? 
Why  hypostatize  unity?  There  are  all  sorts  and  degrees  of 
relationship  discovered  and  discoverable  in  the  factual  world. 
Why  not  follow  the  law  of  parsimony  and  rest  satisfied  with  these, 
thus  admitting  that  our  so-called  universe  is  partially  a  multiverse, 
that  it  is  a  whole,  not  in  itself,  but  only  for  a  finite  totalizing  mind, 
a  collection  only  for  the  collector  and  not  in  itself — one  subject  of 
discourse  but  not  one-being-in-itself . 

This  much  seems  to  me  certain — the  progress  of  the  mind  in 
successful  knowing  and  practical  activity  refute  the  doctrine  that 
things  and  relations  are  mutually  external  to,  or  independent,  of, 
one  another.  Cognition  and  action  are  transactions  of  the  self,  as 
a  member  of  a  system  or  cosmos,  with  other  members  of  the  system. 
So  much  stands  fast,  whatever  be  the  most  plausible  interpretation 
of  the  nature  and  meaning  of  the  whole  system ;  whether  it  be  life, 
mind  or  a  system  of  mass-particles.  Relations  express  and  realize 
the  natures  of  things,  and  the  natures  of  things  do  not  exist  out  of 
relations.  There  is  a  multiplicity  of  orders  of  relation  between 
things,  and  there  may  be  a  plurality  of  qualitatively  distinct  types 
of  existence,  but  no  thing  has  any  real  existence  apart  from  its 
relations,  and  no  relations  really  exist  otherwise  than  as  transac- 
tions between  things.  The  nature  of  a  thing  cannot  be  conceived 
apart  from  its  position  and  connections  in  a  group,  a  class,  or  a 


RELATIONS  157 

series.  The  advocate  of  wholly  external  relations  puts  the  problem 
wrongly  when  he  assumes,  if  relations  are  relevant  or  intrinsic, 
that  means  that  the  relations  somehow  or  other  enter  into  and  bur- 
glarize the  things,  wholly  upsetting  their  internal  economy;  and 
pass  out  after  another  disturbance.  But  there  are  no  locked  and 
barred  things — no  windowless  monads,  to  begin  with.  All  exist- 
ents  are  individua,  unitary  complexes  of  qualities  which  exist  only 
in  so  far  as  they  function  in  the  totality  of  the  real.  The  actual 
universe  is  a  manifold  of  individua. 

If  one  begin  with  the  assumption  that  reality  consists  of 
entities  or  terms  and  qualities  and  relations,  with  no  more  con- 
nection than  a  verbal  conjunction  in  the  mind  of  the  philosopher, 
it  will,  of  course,  require  a  tour  de  force  to  get  these  disconnected 
bits  of  a  possible  world  into  some  sort  of  coherent  universe.  The 
only  alternative  conclusions  from  such  a  starting  point  are,  either 
that  the  real  world  is  but  an  aggregate  or  chaotic  heap  of  discon- 
nected entities  (chaotic  pluralism),  or  that  relations  are  unreal  and 
reality  is  super-relational  (abstract  monism).  But  the  initial 
assumption  begs  the  whole  question  as  to  the  nature  of  reality. 
Reality  does  not  consist  of  absolutely  isolated  fragments.  Em- 
pirical reality  is  always  some  sort  of  a  whole,  consisting  of  specific 
qualities  in  determinate  relations.  Epistemologically,  things  are 
undoubtedly  constructions  out  of  the  raw  qualities  of  sense-experi- 
ence; but  the  latter  lends  itself  to  this  construction  because,  onto- 
logically,  it  is  a  systematic  complex  of  determinate  qualities  in 
specific  relations.  In  empirical  reality  there  is  no  sound  or  color 
in  general,  no  redness  or  smoothness  in  general ;  only  determinate 
colors,  sounds,  and  tactile  qualities.  There  is  no  equality  or  in- 
equality, no  greater  or  less ;  only  specific  sense-complexes  that  may 
be  regarded  as  equal,  unequal,  greater  and  less.  The  relations 
which  the  mind  finds  between  sense-data  are  indeed  abstractions; 
but  these  abstractions  would  be  meaningless,  were  not  the  actual 
world  a  complex  of  systematically  connected  sensory  data. 

While,  from  our  special  and  limited  points  of  view,  there  are 
relations  which  seem  wholly  external,  in  reality  there  can  be  no 
absolutely  external  relations  between  things.  Our  intellectual  con- 
structions approximate  in  varying  degree  to  the  systematic  totality 
of  the  real.  Our  thinking  does  indeed  falsify  reality,  by  ignoring 
many  of  the  relations  of  entities  and  by  misconceiving  others. 
But  thinking  would  have  no  motive  even  for  misconstruing  rela- 


158  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

tions,  if  the  world  were  not  a  real  complex  of  related  things.  It 
is  because  of  the  limitations  of  our  ignorances  or  our  special 
interests  that  many  relations  seem  external.  On  the  other  hand, 
the  supposition  that  ultimate  reality  is  a  super-relational  absolute, 
and  that  all  our  relating  activities  falsify  it,  destroys  the  possibility 
of  understanding  or  acting  in  a  world.  If  there  are  no  real  rela- 
tions in  the  ultimate  universe  it  must  be  an  utterly  unintelligible 
and  static  one ;  incapable  of  analysis,  and  to  the  parts  of  which  no 
predicates  can  be  validly  attributed. 

If  there  be  a  universe,  then  all  elements  of  it  are  in  some  rela- 
tions to  some  other  elements,  but  not  necessarily  all  to  all.  The 
universe  as  a  whole  is  in  no  relation,  since,  by  hypothesis,  it 
includes  all  relations;  but  this  does  not  preclude  a  mind,  as  a 
conscious  focus  of  relationships,  from  truly  apprehending  its  own 
relations  to  other  parts  of  the  universe  and  the  relations  of  other 
parts  of  the  universe  which  it  contemplates  to  one  another.  The 
Spencerian  argument  that,  because  thinking  is  relationing,  we 
cannot  partially  know  the  absolute,  is  a  fallacy.  A  more  serious 
argument  against  the  reality  of  relations  is  that  of  which  Mr. 
Bradley's  dialectic  is  the  best  known  modern  instance. 

Mr.  Bradley  argues  that  we  cannot  consistently  think  things 
and  their  qualities — space,  time,  causality,  activity,  the  self,  etc., 
through  to  the  end,  because  we  always  become  lost  in  the  indef- 
inite regress  of  terms  and  relations.  According  to  this  type  of 
argument  my  relation  of  paternity  to  my  son  is  inconsistent 
appearance,  because,  in  order  to  render  it  intelligible,  we  must 
find  a  relation  which  relates  me  to  paternity  and  paternity  to  my 
son,  other  relations  which  relate  these  relations  to  me  and  him, 
and  so  on  forever.  Thus  the  more  persistently  I  try  to  think  out 
the  relationship  the  farther  my  son  and  I  drift  apart.  Mr.  Brad- 
ley's argument  is  effective  against  any  theory  which  would  set  up 
things,  qualities,  causality,  space,  time,  etc.,  as  entities  existing  by 
themselves.  He  demolishes  the  pluralistic  world  of  tiny  absolutes. 
But  his  conclusion  that  all  determinate  existents,  including  all 
specific  truths  and  all  qualities  of  finite  beings,  must  be  merged 
and  transmuted  in  a  super-relational  absolute  does  not  follow. 
There  are  mediating  or  intermediary  relationships  but,  in  the  last 
analysis,  all  mediating  relationships  are  grounded  on  immediate 
relationships.  My  relation  to  my  son  is  a  two  term  and  asym- 
metrical immediate  relationship.    To  say  that  A  is  the  grandfather 


RELATIONS  159 

of  C  is  to  state  an  intermediary  relationship  which  is  grounded  on 
the  immediate  relations,  A  is  the  father  of  B  and  B  is  the  father 
of  C.  But  there  can  be  no  immediate  relations  unless  the  terms 
related  are  distinct  existents.  It  is  true  that  we  can  never  com- 
plete the  apprehension  of  the  relations  in  which  a  finite  existent 
exists.  There  are  two  reasons  for  our  inability — first,  the  enor- 
mous complexity  and  extent  of  relations;  second,  since  relations 
are  transactions  and  all  existents  are  elements  in  a  dynamic  uni- 
verse, relations  change  and  existents  change  with  them.  It  does 
not  follow  that  our  partial  knowledge  of  relations  is  false  because 
it  is  partial,  because  we  do  not  know  all  the  relationships  of  the 
relata  that  we  do  know  in  the  whole  system  of  reality ;  for  example, 
the  proposition  "my  writing  paper  is  now  on  this  desk"  is  now 
absolutely  true  to  me;  and  for  even  a  cosmic  knower  it  must  be 
true  that  this  proposition  is  true  for  me ;  otherwise,  he  is  thus  far 
a  poorer  knower  than  I  am.  My  true  apprehension  of  the  rela- 
tions of  entities  are  valid  for  me  and  as  far  as  they  go,  because  my 
position  in  the  whole  scheme  of  things  is  what  it  is.  The  relativity 
of  my  knowing,  as  compared  with  cosmic  knowledge,  does  not 
invalidate  mine  since  the  latter  is  the  apprehension,  by  a  finite 
member,  and  in  part,  of  his  own  place  and  relations  in  the  whole. 

It  remains  to  add  that  what  we  regard  as  relevant  relations, 
relations  that  are  significant  for  the  natures  and  destinies  of  the 
things  related,  depend  on  our  individual  interests,  purposes  and 
situations.  Relations  that  are  significant  for  one  individual  or 
purpose  may  be  insignificant  for  another.  The  world  is  wide  and 
rich  in  the  natures  and  relations  and  points  of  view  of  its  elements. 
But  in  the  long  run  every  apprehended  relation  that  is  true  and 
that  works  must  be  grounded  in  the  objective  texture  of  reality. 
We  search  for  relations  pragmatically  and  we  work  them  prag- 
matically, subject  to  the  structural  or  textural  order  of  reality. 

We  may  sum  up  the  foregoing  as  follows :  (1)  If  entities  are  in 
any  relation  the  natures  of  the  entities  and  the  relations  cannot  be 
entirely  external  to,  or  independent  of,  one  another.  (2)  There 
are  many  sorts  of  relations  and  degrees  of  closeness,  intimacy,  or 
relevancy  in  the  relations  of  entities.  Each  distinguishable  type 
of  relationship  is  best  called  an  order,  or  system.  (3)  Reality  as 
a  whole  may  be  a  universe  or  total  system.  Therefore,  there  may 
be  an  order  of  orders,  a  cosmic  system  which  is  fundamental  to  all 
the  special  types  of  order  in  the  universe.     (4)  The  probable  char- 


160  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

acter  of  this  supreme  order  canot  be  determined  by  epistemological 
or  dialectical  considerations  alone.  It  can  be  determined  only  by  a 
synthesis  of  the  chief  aspects  of  reality,  after  these  aspects  have 
been  determined  by  a  comprehensive  analysis  of  human  experiences 
and  attitudes  in  their  total  characters.  Specifically,  we  must 
consider  both  the  real  logic  of  sense-experience,  the  real  logic  of 
values,  and  the  ultimate  problem  of  the  relation  between  the  order 
of  sense-experience  and  the  order  of  values. 

1.  The  first  proposition  does  not  now  require  extended  defense, 
since  it  underlies  the  entire  discussion  of  knowledge  and  reality. 
To  say  that  any  two  or  more  entities  are  so  related  that  their 
natures  would  be  precisely  the  same  as  they  are  in  this  relation  if 
they  never  had  been,  nor  could  be,  in  this  relation ;  or  that  if  the 
relation  should  absolutely  cease  the  entities  would  not  thereby  be 
affected  in  any  degree  or  kind  of  quality — is  to  talk  nonsense. 
The  assertion  that  things  can  be  absolutely  the  same  in  and  out  of 
relations  seems  to  be  simply  an  appeal  to  the  thoughtlessness  of  the 
naive.  The  more  we  learn  to  understand  and  control  things,  just 
by  so  much  do  we  find  that  they  live  only  in  relations.  The  plausi- 
bility of  the  assertion  that  relations  need  make  no  difference  what- 
soever to  the  terms  related  by  them  is  due  to  the  fact  that  many 
relations  are,  for  many  purposes,  negligible  or  practically  irrel- 
evant ;  or,  at  least,  in  our  ignorance,  we  are  prone  to  think  so.  For 
most  people's  purposes  it  makes  no  difference  who  Ikanaton  was ; 
but  to  the  Egyptologist  it  makes  a  lot  of  difference,  and,  if  I  knew 
enough,  I  might  see  that  it  made  a  great  difference  to  western 
civilization.  I  cannot  see  that  the  solution  of  certain  problems  in 
higher  mathematics  makes  any  serious  difference  to  practical  life 
now,  but  it  may  make  a  great  difference  to  the  future  of  both 
engineering  and  logic.  The  world  is  rich  and  wide  in  content.  It 
contains  a  multitude  of  things,  which  no  man  can  number,  existing 
in  multitudinous  relations.  Many  relations  that  we  know  some- 
thing of,  we,  for  most  of  our  purposes,  ignore.  Of  the  significance 
of  many  relations  that  we  glimpse  we  are  ignorant.  Of  the  very 
existence  of  many  relations  we  are  in  total  ignorance.  But,  either 
the  universe  is  in  some  way  a  system  or  order  of  related  entities, 
or  there  is  no  universe. 

2.  There  are  many  distinct  types  of  order.  The  categories  of 
the  philosopher  and  the  scientist  are  just  generic  names  for  the 
basic  types  of  order.    The  whole  business  of  systematic  philosophy 


RELATIONS  161 

or  metaphysics  is  to  consider  the  various  types  of  order  and  to  try 
to  order  them  into  a  comprehensive  order  system.  Mathematics 
and  logic  are  the  theories  of  formal  or  abstract  intellectual  order. 
Metaphysics  is  the  doctrine  of  concrete  or  real  order — spatial, 
temporal,  causal  (physical,  vital  and  psychological),  teleological  or 
axiological,  social  orders.  Our  further  discussion  will  be  con- 
cerned principally  with  these  orders  and  their  relations. 

3.  All  special  types  of  order  must  be  elements  in  the  total- 
order-system  of  reality — the  cosmos.  To  deny  this  statement 
would  be  to  assert  that,  while  there  are  various  systems  of  order 
in  the  universe,  since  these  have  no  relation  to  one  another  they 
are  not  in  the  universe,  since  there  is  no  universe  to  contain  them. 
But  we  know  that  the  spatial  and  temporal  relations  are  bound  up 
with  causal  and  teleological  relations.  We  know  that  when  we  pass 
from  abstract  symbolic  logic  to  the  logic  of  reality,  we  have  entered 
a  realm  where  all  orders  and,  therefore,  all  relations  and  entities 
related  "in  one  another's  being  mingle."  It  is  not  possible  to  sit 
down  and  try  to  think  through  to  the  bitter  end  any  fundamental 
problem  of  reality — for  example,  the  nature  of  space  or  time  or 
causality,  or  the  nature  of  mechanism  in  its  relation  to  life,  per- 
sonality and  value,  without  running  into  all  the  other  problems. 

All  special  order  systems,  then,  are  probably  grounded  on  one 
supreme  living  order.  In  so  far  as  reality  is  a  cosmos  or  universe, 
and  not  a  chaos,  it  must  be  sustained  by  one  ground — a  cosmic 
order-of-orders.  And,  since  the  universe,  as  we  live  in  it  and 
know  it  through  living  in  it,  is  dynamic,  the  cosmic  principle  or 
ground  of  order  must  be  a  dynamic  or  active  principle. 

4.  The  final  problem  of  metaphysics  is  this — what  can  we  say, 
specifically,  as  to  the  character  of  the  cosmic  ground  of  order? 
Book  V  will  be  devoted  to  the  consideration  of  this  question. 


CHAPTER  XIII 


OKDER1 


Order  is  the  most  fundamental  and  inclusive  type  of  relation. 
Indeed,  every  objective  and  intrinsic  relation  depends  on  an  order 
— spatial  relations  on  the  spatial  order,  temporal  relations  on  the 
temporal  order,  social  relations  on  the  social  order,  etc.  The  chief 
difference  between  the  meaning  of  the  two  notions  is  that  when 
one  speaks  of  relation  one  may  have  in  mind  only  the  principle  of 
connection  between  two  entities,  whereas  when  one  speaks  of  an 
order  one  definitely  implies  the  whole  existential  complex,  the 
particular  or  individual  relata  and  their  relations  taken  as  a  whole. 
Thus  an  order  means  a  system  of  particulars  or  individuals  con- 
nected in  a  regular  manner,  by  contrast  with  both  a  collection  of 
abstract  relationships  or  subsistents  and  a  mere  junk  heap  of 
unrelated  existents. 

The  entire  realm  of  experience  includes  a  variety  of  distinct 
types  of  order.  It  is  the  business  of  the  special  sciences  to  deter- 
mine, in  their  respective  fields,  the  basic  types  of  order.  It  is  the 
business  of  metaphysics  to  survey  these  various  special  types  of 
order  and  to  order  them,  if  possible,  into  one  order  system  or  intel- 
ligible cosmos.  Every  order  is  a  one-in-many,  a  unity  or  continuity 
in  difference,  a  systematic  togetherness.  The  ultimate  order  would 
be  the  Ordo  Ordinans  or  supreme  order,  of  which  all  special  orders 
would  be  partial  expressions.  If,  as  Spinoza  said,  the  order  and 
connection  of  ideas  is  the  same  as  the  order  and  connection  of 
things,  then  the  ultimate  order  has  a  two-faced  series  of  manifesta- 
tions. Spinoza's  statement  oversimplifies  the  case,  as  will  appear 
later  when  we  discuss  the  mind-body  problem.  I  shall  argue  that 
it  is  a  reasonable  hypothesis  that  the  various  special  orders  of 

1  The  following  chapter  is  a  rapid  survey,  or  preliminary  sketch,  of  the 
main  line  of  argument  and  doctrine  that  will  be  developed  step  by  step  in 
the  entire  remainder  of  this  work.  Together  with  Chapter  35,  this  chapter 
gives  the  logical  key  to  the  whole  body  of  the  discussion.  The  reader  should 
bear  it  in  mind  and  return  to  it  in  considering  the  later  parts. 

162 


ORDER  163 

existence  constitute  a  hierarchical  series,  and  that  the  supreme 
principle  of  order  is  most  adequately  manifested  in  the  richest  type 
of  finite  order.  There  is,  however,  another  sense  in  which 
Spinoza's  statement  is  true — namely,  that  order  is  at  once  mentally 
objective  and  physically  objective;  there  is  a  correspondence  be- 
tween the  order  of  true  thinking  and  thoughtful  willing  on  the  one 
hand  and  the  order  of  physical  reality,  the  space-time-motion  order, 
on  the  other  hand. 

In  books  III,  IV  and  V  we  shall  be  concerned  with  the  concrete 
characteristics  of  the  various  main  types  of  existents  and  with  their 
relations  to  one  another  as  aspects  of  the  cosmos.  A  rapid  survey 
of  the  hierarchy  of  order  series  will  make  a  logical  transition  to 
III.    Every  order  involves  particulars  in  relation. 

1.  Qualitative  Order. — The  simplest  cases  of  order  are  perhaps 
those  of  the  generic  orders  of  sense  qualities.  Colors  are  each  and 
every  one  distinct  existents,  but  they  form  a  scale  of  order;  so 
with  sounds,  temperatures,  etc.  There  are  orders  of  intensity ;  for 
example,  degrees  of  brightness,  color  saturation,  pleasure,  pain, 
pitch,  etc.  It  may  be  that  the  order  of  qualitative  differences 
within  the  same  sensory  kind  is  in  every  case  reducible  to  the  order 
of  intensive  magnitude  or  degree. 

2.  Spatial  Order. — Our  three  dimensional  space  involves  a 
number  of  orders,  such  as — points  on  a  line,  lines  on  a  surface, 
depth,  sense  or  direction,  before  and  behind,  straight  ahead, 
above,  below,  right  and  left.  Every  spatial  order  involves  relations 
between  particular  positions  existing  simultaneously.  The  most 
familiar  instance  is  the  relation  of  all  observed  positions  to  the 
observer's  position.  Positions  are  the  individua  of  spatial  order. 
One  set  of  spatial  order  may  be  transformed  into  another,  by  super- 
position, translation,  or  by  imagining  the  observer  translated,  in- 
verted, etc.  The  mind  can  manipulate  spatial  order  in  various 
ways,  as  in  geometries ;  but  it  must  first  find  spatial  order  before 
it  can  juggle  with  it;  and  transcendental  geometries  are  logical 
jugglings  of  the  empirically  found  spatial  order.  In  brief,  spatial 
order  is  given  as  real  in  sensory  experience  and  found  to  be  intelli- 
gible— that  is,  intellectually  manageable  within  the  limits  of  its 
given  nature. 

3.  Temporal  Order. — This  again  is  a  simple  and  unique  prop- 
erty of  experience  as  lived  (Erlebniss  is  the  expressive  German 
word).    It  is  the  irreversible  flux  or  movement  of  experiences  from 


104:  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

past  through  present  toward  future.2  Temporal  order  has  thus 
one  sense  or  direction.  (It  seems  to  be  misleading  to  call  it  a 
"dimension"  and  to  speak  of  time  as  a  fourth  dimension  of  space. 
It  would  be  just  as  correct  to  speak  of  space  as  the  second,  third 
and  fourth  directions  of  time).  Space  and  time  involve  each  other, 
since  spatial  orders  imply  the  simultaneity  of  points  and  direc- 
tions ;  that  is,  their  temporal  duration ;  and  the  temporal  order  of 
duration  involves  the  occupation  of  moments  or  instants  by  posi- 
tions. I  have  said  that  temporal  order  is  single  as  well  as  irre- 
versible. These  statements  are  questionable.  Could  it  not  be  said 
that  temporal  order  is  double — that  it  has  two  directions  or  senses, 
from  the  present  backwards  to  the  past  and  forwards  to  the  future ; 
and  if  this  is  so  may  not  temporal  order  be  reversible  ?  Mr.  Brad- 
ley argues  for  a  variety  of  time  series — one,  for  instance,  in  which 
death  is  followed  by  old  age,  maturity,  youth,  childhood,  birth, 
conception.  I  can  conceive  of  one  finite  temporal  series  as  being 
the  exact  repetition  of  another,  but  I  am  unable  to  conceive  of  one 
infinite  temporal  series  of  real  events  being  the  precise  reverse  of 
another.  Such  a  supposition  would,  it  seems  to  me,  imply  that  one 
of  the  series  in  question  is  illusory  or  imaginary,  one  of  Leibniz's 
possible  worlds.  There  may  be  an  indefinite  multitude  of  temporal 
series,  with  different  rates  of  velocities,  but  they  must  all  have 
one  direction,  if  experience  be  not  wholly  illusory.  The  empirical 
temporal  order  is  one  direction,  since  the  past  does  not  grow  out 
of  the  present  but  the  present  out  of  the  past  as  the  future  out  of 
the  present.  The  temporal  order,  in  the  forms  of  either  the  per- 
duration  of  a  system  of  relations  through  a  stretch  of  time  or  a 
definite  sequence  of  distinct  events,  is  basic  to  all  conceptions  of 
continuity. 

Whether  it  be  spatial  continuity,  numerical  continuity,  dura- 
tional continuity,  or  causal  continuity;  in  every  case  the  idea  of 
continuity  is  that  of  an  order  of  permanent  or  regular  relations 
enduring  through  a  temporal  succession.  (Compare  Chapters 
XIV,  XVI,  XVIII,  XXXV,  and  XXXVII.) 

4.  Numerical  Order  arises,  as  we  saw  in  Chapter  XI,  from  the 
location  and  arrangement  of  sense  qualities  in  space  and  time, 
but  numerical  ordering  of  existents  always  implies  a  judgment  of 
value.     If  one  is  counting  or  measuring  things  without  regard  to 

2  For  Bergson,  time  is  the  unique  dimension  of  life.  Eeal  time  is  liv- 
ingness. 


ORDER  165 

differences  of  value  the  question  of  order  is  indifferent.  If  I  am 
considering  how  many  books  I  have,  regardless  of  their  contents, 
it  makes  no  difference  in  what  order  I  count  them.  If  I  were 
arranging  them  for  sale  I  should  do  it  in  the  order  of  their  values. 
When  we  arrange  things  in  numerical  order;  for  example,  the 
batting  order  of  a  baseball  team,  the  order  of  precedence  at  a  social 
function,  the  order  of  merit  on  examinations,  orders  of  greatness 
in  statesmanship  or  art,  we  are  using  ordinal  number  to  express  an 
order  of  values.  Thus  the  order  of  values  is  implicated  in  the 
ordering  of  existents.  Indeed  it  is  tied  up  with  our  simplest 
spatial  and  temporal  orderings. 

5.  Causal  Order. — A  causal  order  is  an  irreversible  series  in 
which  the  occurrence  of  one  event  is  an  indispensable  condition  of 
the  occurrence  of  the  next  event.  Thus  the  causal  order  is  a  tem- 
poral order  which  involves  the  idea  of  the  existential  dependence 
of  one  event  on  the  immediately  precedent  events.  Existential, 
temporal  dependence  differentiates  the  causal  order  from  a  logical 
order  of  timeless  implication  (ground  and  consequent) .  The  notion 
of  causal  order  is  thus  a  more  concrete  form  of  the  notion  of  tem- 
poral order.  The  irreversibility  of  the  temporal  flux  implies  that 
the  preceding  instants  or  moments  contain  the  real  conditions  of 
the  present,  that  a  specific  complex  of  qualities  in  relation  is  the 
condition  of  a  succeeding  complex.  The  maxim,  every  event  must 
have  a  cause,  means  nothing  more  than  that  in  the  flux  of  experi- 
ence the  antecedent  is  the  condition  of  the  coming  into  existence 
of  the  consequent.  The  fallacy  of  post  hoc  ergo  propter  hoc  is  a 
fallacy  only  because  of  lack  of  thorough  analysis  of  repeated  obser- 
vations. We  have  really  no  other  ground  for  asserting  a  causal 
relation  than  that  of  immediate  contiguity  and  succession  of  events 
in  the  spatial  and  temporal  order.  The  supposed  necessity  of  the 
causal  order  is  the  universal  empirical  fact  of  the  one-directional, 
irreversible  flux  of  temporal  experience. 

A  causal  order,  considered  as  a  blind  push  or  inevitable  pro- 
cession in  which  each  successive  moment  is  made  by  the  rearrange- 
ment in  space  of  the  factors  in  the  preceding  moment,  in  which  one 
collocation  issues  blindly  in  the  next  collocation,  and  in  which 
there  is  complete  quantitative  and  qualitative  equivalence  in  the 
two  collocations,  is  a  mecJianical  causal  order.  There  are  close 
approximations  to  mechanical  causal  orders  in  the  realm  of  inor- 
ganic nature;  but,  since  new  collocations  give  rise  to  new  assem- 


166  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

blages  of  qualities,  it  may  be  doubted  whether  even  the  inorganic 
realm  is  wholly  mechanical.  Indeed,  if  the  second  law  of  thermo- 
dynamics be  valid,  this  cannot  be  the  case. 

6.  Teleological  Order  is  a  causal  order  in  which  the  successive 
moments  are  not  the  blind  and  inevitable  products  of  the  re- 
arrangements of  collocations  of  atoms,  but  one  in  which  a  unity  of 
plan  or  meaning  pervades  and  is  developed  through  a  series  of 
moments,  which  thus  constitute  not  a  mere  serial  sequence  of 
slightly  differing  events  but  a  persisting  whole  which  is  present  in 
all  its  parts  and  makes  of  them  an  organic  totality.  The  teleo- 
logical order  is  a  temporal  and  causal  order  which  unifies  its  suc- 
cessive moments  in  a  trans-temporal  totality.  Here  we  begin  to 
get  a  clew  to  a  principle  of  cosmic  order  or  organization  that  is 
temporal  and  yet  permanent,  many  and  yet  one,  including  a  suc- 
cession of  events  in  a  noneventual  meaning,  causal  and  yet  pur- 
posive. It  is  sometimes  said  that  teleological  causality  involves 
the  determination  of  the  present  by  the  future.  This  is  mis- 
leading. It  involves  the  unification  or  continuity  of  the  present 
with  the  past  by  a  plan  or  meaning  which  is  continuous  with  and 
expands  into  the  future  as  the  latter  becomes  present.  It  is  in  the 
organic,  mental  and  social  orders  that  we  find  teleological  order. 

7.  Organic  and  Mental  Orders. — These  I  treat  together  since 
it  is  in  the  mental-teleological  order  that  the  meaning  of  the  or- 
ganic order  becomes  manifest.     An  organism  is  a  whole  in  which 
the  parts  cannot  exist  apart  from  the  whole  and  the  principle  of  the 
whole  functions  in  all  the  parts.    An  organism  may  be  regarded  as 
a  machine,  since  it  consists  of  mechanisms ;  but,  since  it  is  a  self- 
running,  self-repairing  and  self-reproducing  machine,  it  is  more 
than  a  mere  machine.     The  order  of  life  exhibits  a  large  number 
of  degrees  of  organic  unity  emerging  from,  supervening  upon,  and 
controlling  mechanisms.     A  mental  order — for  example,  a  single 
type  of  purposed  human  activity,  or  better  still  the  organized  unity 
of  a  whole  human  life  as  the  continuous  fulfillment  of  a  plan  or  a 
meaning — is  an  order  in  which  the  successive  steps  or  moments  are 
not  external  to  one  another  and  not  the  blind  rearrangement  of 
similar  elements.     One  moment  or  act  does  not  placidly  dissolve 
its  elements  to  be  blindly  rearranged  into  the  next  act.     A  con- 
tinuous plan  or  meaning  embodied  in  a  whole  life  is  an  order  in 
which  the  particular  acts  and  experiences  interpenetrate,  since 
they  are  all  pervaded  and  organized  by  the  principle  of  the  whole. 


ORDER  167 

The  past  lives  in  the  whole  of  the  present  and  the  present  is  big 
with  the  future,  and  past,  present  and  future  are  phases  in  the 
living  unity  of  a  unique  and  individual  life  and  experience.  Per- 
haps the  supertemporal  or  "eternal"  meaning  of  life  and  the 
cosmos  will  be  found  in  the  notion  of  Spiritual  Order  (see  Chap- 
ter XXXV). 

8.  Axiological  Order  or  order  of  values.  The  achievement  and 
conservation  of  intrinsic  values — such  as  welfare,  happiness,  love, 
beauty,  truth — are  the  determining  or  unifying  and  controlling 
principles  in  the  teleological  order.  To  discuss  the  nature  of 
values  and  their  place  in  reality  at  this  point  would  be  to  anticipate 
future  chapters.  It  is  sufficient  here  to  point  out  that  the  order  of 
values  enters  into  our  ordering  in  other  orders;  even  ordering 
existents  spatially,  temporally,  numerically  and  causally  involves 
ordering  in  terms  of  values.  In  the  organic  and  mental  orders 
values  appear  explicitly,  and  in  their  own  right,  as  determining 
principles. 

9.  Social  Order. — This  is  the  richest  and  most  inclusive  type 
of  order.  It  is  par  excellence  a  teleological  and  axiological  order. 
Social  organization,  the  institutions  of  politics,  law,  morality,  edu- 
cation, religion,  science,  art  and  letters — in  short,  the  whole  work 
of  culture — is  a  complex  of  partial  orders  in  which  the  superindi- 
vidual  order  of  society  is  furthered.  It  is  an  old  saying  that  a 
man  realizes  his  true  being  in  the  social  order.  The  truest  indi- 
vidual, the  fullest  personality,  is  the  one  who  is  most  nearly 
typical,  universal,  or  super-individual  in  his  thinking  and  his 
deeds.  As  we  shall  see  more  fully  later  on,  the  social  mind  is  not 
an  entity  which  exists  as  such  apart  from  the  minds  of  the  indi- 
vidual members  of  the  social  order.  But  the  social  mind  is  more 
than  the  mind  of  any  individual  as  he  actually  is  when  taken  in 
isolation  from  his  fellows.  It  is  not  the  arithmetical  sum  of  the 
minds  of  the  individual  members  of  society.  In  becoming  the 
organ  of  the  purposes  of  society,  in  making  himself  the  instrument 
for  the  realization  of  the  cultural  values  of  the  social  order,  the 
individual  is  transcending  his  given  individuality.  The  mind  of 
a  nation,  the  mind  of  England,  for  example,  or  the  spirit  of  the 
church  or  the  university,  live  and  move  and  have  their  being  in  the 
members  of  the  social  order;  but  they  are  more  enduringly  real 
than  the  individual  members  regarded  as  private  centers  of  feeling 
and  thought.     They  transform  the  individuals  by  giving  them 


168  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

membership  in  a  spiritual  order  which  is  not  the  sum  of  individual 
feelings,  thoughts  and  volitions;  for  the  spirit  of  a  society  is  one 
which  binds  human  souls,  past,  present  and  to  come,  into  a  living 
and  enduring  unity.  This  conception  of  a  spiritual  order  which  is 
more  pervasive  and  enduring  than  any  individual  mind  will  be 
considered  more  at  length  later  on  when  we  come  to  discuss  the 
problem  of  the  ultimate  order  or  cosmic  unity. 


CHAPTER  XIV 

THE    PARTICULAR,    THE    UNIVERSAL   AND   THE    INDIVIDUAL 

The  ''things"  of  immediate  sense  experience  are  discrete  com- 
plexes of  sensory  qualities.  But  these  discrete  things  are  all  per- 
ceived and  conceived  to  be  present  simultaneously  in  a  continuous 
medium,  namely  space.  Common  sense  means  by  the  continuity 
of  space  that  no  two  portions  of  space,  however  minute,  are  sep- 
arated either  by  no  being  or  by  nonspatial  being.  What  common 
sense  means  by  empty  space  is  a  portion  of  space  in  which  our 
efforts  meet  with  no  perceptible  resistance ;  and  in  which,  through 
our  senses  of  sight,  touch  and  movement,  we  are  conscious  of  no 
movement  or  resistance.  So-called  empty  space  is  not  literally 
empty  since  we  perceive  light,  color  and  atmosphere  in  it.  It 
transmits  movements  not  detected  bv  the  unaided  senses :  such  as 
radio-active  transformations,  electromagnetic  tensions  and  gravita- 
tion. The  universal  space-filling  ether  is  assumed  to  exist  as  the 
continuous  medium  for  the  transmissions  of  these  movements  and 
forces.  As  Lord  Salisbury  said,  ether  was  invented  as  a  subject 
for  the  verb  "to  undulate."  Indeed,  it  is  a  postulate  of  theoretical 
thought  and  of  practical  activity  that  there  is  dynamic  continuity 
everywhere  in  the  realm  of  nature.  Static  continuity  is  simply 
our  coarse,  in-the-lump  way  of  perceiving  dynamical  continuity. 

On  the  other  hand,  physics  and  chemistry  find  cogent  grounds 
for  the  hypothesis  that  the  concrete  things  of  sense  perception  are 
made  up  of  very  minute  and  imperceptible  corpuscles  (electrons 
in  the  newest  form  of  the  corpuscular  hypothesis)  which  are  con- 
stant in  inertia  or  mass  and  in  their  attractive  and  repulsive 
mutual  relations  (valence  in  chemistry).  It  is  impossible  to 
believe  that  perceptible  matter  is  absolutely  continuous,  in  view 
of  its  enormous  capacity  for  expansion  and  contraction.  The 
phenomena  of  the  expansion  and  contraction  of  gases,  of  solutions 
and  of  osmosis,  are  impossible  to  account  for  on  any  other  hypoth- 
esis than  that  of  the  granular  structure  of  matter.     In  the  elec- 

169 


170  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

tronic  theory  of  matter  the  ordinary  atom  is  regarded  as  built  up 
out  of  a  core  or  nucleus  of  negative  electricity  with  the  units  of 
positive  electricity  revolving  around  it.  Mass  or  inertia  is  present 
wherever  there  is  potential  energy. 

We  are  not  here  concerned  with  the  question  of  the  ultimate 
structure  of  physical  matter.  The  granular  theory  carries  out,  to 
a  high  degree  of  refinement,  the  logical  demand  for  discrete  ele- 
ments to  account  for  the  qualitative  discreteness  of  perceived 
things.  On  the  other  hand,  the  physicist  finds  it  impossible  to 
work  out  a  granular  theory  without  postulating  some  sort  of  con- 
tinuous medium  as  carrier  of  the  dynamical  relations  between  the 
corpuscles.  The  ether  performs  this  logical  function  in  present 
day  physics  and  thus  logically  is  identical  with  physical  space.  If 
the  ether  should  be  scrapped,  some  other  medium  will  have  to  be 
invented  to  take  its  place.  For  both  common  sense  thinking  and 
physical  theory,  which  is  a  refinement  of  common  sense  thinking, 
require  the  recognition  of  both  discreteness,  or  particularity,  and 
complexity,  in  the  elements  of  the  world  and  of  continuity  or 
systematic  interrelatedness  between  these  elements.  At  one  time 
continuity  may  be  uppermost  and  at  another  time  discreteness, 
according  to  the  problem  in  hand.  If  one  is  bent  on  microscopic 
analysis  of  sense  data,  discreteness  plays  the  principal  role ;  if  one 
is  bent  on  synthesis,  continuity  bulks  largest.  From  the  ana- 
lytical point  of  view,  the  discrete  elements  are  substantive  and 
continuity  is  transitive.  On  the  other  hand,  from  a  comprehensive 
or  synthetical  point  of  view,  continuity  is  substantive.  A  ground 
of  interaction  must  be  as  real  as  the  multitude  of  individual  ele- 
ments that  interact.  It  is  obvious  that  here  we  have  to  do  with  a 
capital  phase  of  the  metaphysical  problem  of  singularism  and 
pluralism,  of  the  one  and  many.  The  universe  must  be  some  sort 
of  one-in-many.  The  acute  problem  is  as  to  which  is  more  funda- 
mental, the  manyness  of  the  individual  elements,  or  the  oneness  of 
their  ground  of  interrelation. 

The  whole  problem  of  discreteness  and  continuity,  pluralism 
and  singularism,  takes  on  a  new  turn  when  we  consider  the  world 
as  a  temporal  process.  Experienced  change  is  a  succession  of  dis- 
crete movements  since,  as  William  James  puts  it:  empirical  time 
comes  in  drops ; 1  the  present  moment  is  a  single  pulse  of  experi- 

1  Cf.  James,  Some  Problems  of  Philosophy;  especially  Chaps.  10  and  11. 


THE  PARTICULAR,  UNIVERSAL,  AND  INDIVIDUAL      171 

ence,  in  which  is  fused  together  a  variety  of  features;  any  two 
successive  presents  are.  more  or  less  discontinuous.  What  I  experi- 
enced an  hour  ago  is  discontinuous  with  what  I  now  experience. 
When  we  bring  into  our  purview  months  and  years,  the  discon- 
tinuity becomes  more  striking.  When  we  take  into  account  cen- 
turies and  millenniums  of  history,  the  discontinuity  becomes  still 
more  striking.  Temporal  or  historical  series  are  discrete.  All  the 
past  events  which  one  can  think  of  have  ceased  to  exist  and  no  two 
of  them  were  absolutely  alike,  otherwise  they  would  not  have  been 
two  but  one.  The  history  of  a  single  organism,  of  the  human  indi- 
vidual, of  a  nation,  of  a  church,  of  the  evolutionary  series  of  living 
organisms,  of  a  planet,  of  a  solar  system — all  these  histories  are 
discrete  series,  stories  of  the  development  and  decay  of  individual 
wholes. 

History  or  development  involves  novelty — the  emergence  of 
new  individuals,  their  transformation  and  disappearance.  There 
would  be  no  meaning  in  history,  evolution,  development,  if  there 
were  no  novelties,  no  new  qualitative  syntheses,  no  emergence  of 
differing  individualities.  A  temporal  or  historical  world  is  thus 
essentially  a  world  of  discreteness,  of  novelties.  If  the  new  were 
the  same  as  the  old,  the  effect-  identical  with  the  causes,  the  suc- 
cession of  individualities  a  bare  repetition,  development  and  decay, 
evolution  and  retrogression,  would  be  equally  without  meaning. 
The  distinctions  between  pasts,  presents,  and  futures  would  vanish. 
On  the  other  hand,  the  logical  and  practical  demand  for  continuity 
is  equally  in  evidence  in  our  study  of  the  historical  world. 

Unless  there  be  traceable  continuity  in  the  process,  there  can 
be  no  grasping  of  sequences  or  steps  as  serial.  A  process  that  is  not 
continuous  is  not  one  process,  but  a  chaotic  procession  of  discon- 
nected episodes.  Thus,  without  reference  to  continuities  of  some 
description,  history  and  development  are  meaningless.  Through 
fragmentary  consciousness  and  meager  materials  of  memory,  we 
construct  a  belief  in  the  continuity  of  our  own  personalities. 
Through  fragmentary  historical  record  we  construct  the  continuity 
of  a  nation's  life,  of  a  cultural  movement,  of  the  life  of  humanity, 
of  life  on  the  earth,  of  the  solar  system.  We  trace  the  development 
of  the  spirit  of  England  as  revealed  from  age  to  age,  of  the  spirit 
of  Christianity,  of  the  evolution  of  life,  or  the  solar  system.  Thus 
the  notion  of  historical  continuity  is  a  conceptual  construction,  not 
a  matter  of  immediate  experience.     Nevertheless,  it  is  motivated 


172  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

by  both  practical  and  theoretical  postulates — the  theoretical  desire 
to  comprehend  the  successive  steps  in  the  life  of  any  individual 
whole  as  constituting  an  ordered  sequence  or  series  and  thus  being 
an  individual  whole ;  the  practical  desire  to  gain,  from  the  ordered 
continuity  of  the  past,  prevision  and  control  of  the  future  through 
the  present  or  at  least  inspiration  and  guidance  for  action. 

Finite  number  is  a  discrete  series,  unfolding  according  to  a 
perfectly  determinate  law  of  production;  physical  changes  have 
been,  to  a  considerable  extent,  shown  to  be  subject  to  numerical 
laws  of  production.  Why  not  then  all  historical  changes  ?  The 
mechanical-causal  postulate  is  extended  in  thorough-going  fashion 
to  all  fields  of  history  or  development,  and  means  that  there  is  a 
perfectly  determinate  law  of  production  for  a  series  of  events.  All 
so-called  novelties  would  then  be  wholly  predetermined.  The  vari- 
ations and  individuations  in  the  process  of  time  would  be  the 
inevitable  consequences  of  a  perfectly  determinate  system  of  laws, 
expressing  the  behavior  of  an  equally  determinate  number  of  indi- 
vidual units  alike  in  every  respect,  except  for  their  space  relations. 
Novelty  and  individuality  would  thus  be  nothing  more  than  the 
effect  produced  on  man's  mind  by  the  space  redistributions  in  the 
arrangements  of  elements  having  eternally  constant  properties  of 
inertia  or  mass ;  that  is,  of  simply  mechanical  attraction  or  repul- 
sion. 

But  our  actual  world  is  a  historical  world,  a  world  of  develop- 
ing and  changing  individuals  of  many  descriptions  (I  use  the  term 
"individual"  to  include  organisms,  persons,  nations,  cultural  move- 
ments, the  system  of  living  beings,  the  earth,  the  solar  system). 
The  denial  of  novelty,  of  individuality  and  development,  is  the 
denial  of  the  most  characteristic  feature  of  the  actual  world.  In 
it  there  is  verifiable  continuity,  dynamic  interrelation,  between 
successive  states.  The  whole  universe  is  an  all-inclusive  living 
individuality  or  system.  But  since  there  are,  and  in  the  measure 
in  which  there  are,  in  the  universe,  discrete  centers  of  action  and 
passion,  concrete  individuals,  there  are  limits  to  the  causal  explana- 
tion of  the  qualities  and  actions  of  any  individual  member  of  the 
universe  in  terms  of  the  rest  of  the  system.  The  explanation  of 
the  life  history  of  one  individual  member  of  the  system  cannot  be 
found  wholly  either  in  the  antecedent  phases  of  the  system  or  in 
the  simultaneous  phase  of  the  system.  It  must  be  found  in  part  in 
the  self-active  character  of  the  individual  member.    In  short,  there 


THE  PARTICULAR,  UNIVERSAL,  AND  INDIVIDUAL      173 

are  two  kinds  of  temporal  continuity:  (a)  the  mechanical  con- 
tinuity which  would  account  for  the  character  and  state  of  every 
finite  individual  as  being  the  mathematical  expression  of  forces 
behind  and  outside  that  individual ;  (b)  the  teleological  continuity 
within  the  life  history  of  an  individual  (including  those  individ- 
uals which  are  groups  of  lesser  individuals)  as  being  a  unique 
self-active  member  of  a  larger  system.  In  other  words,  the  actual 
historical  world  is  one  of  creative  novelty,  of  genuine  development. 
Real  history  is  constituted  by  the  self-development  of  individuals 
in  interaction. 

It  must  be  admitted  then  that  discreteness,  or  qualitative 
uniqueness,  and  self -activity  or  individuality,  are  just  as  elemental 
features  of  the  world  as  continuity.  Perhaps  they  are  even  more 
elemental.  The  universe  seems  not  so  much  one  as  it  is  many — 
many  individuals  of  many  kinds  in  many  relations. 

There  appears  to  be  a  quarrel  between  the  concrete  individ- 
uality of  actual  intuition  and  the  results  of  analytical  science.  The 
latter  tends  to  evaporate  an  individual  into  an  aggregation  of  quali- 
tatively poor  atoms,  brought  together  and  held  together  by  purely 
external  relations.  Psychology  dissolves  personality  into  sensa- 
tions and  impulses  or,  more  recently,  into  reflex  movements,  and 
these  into  neurone  processes.  Bio-chemistry  dissolves  neurone 
processes  into  reactions  of  the  chemical  elements.  Physics  dis- 
solves the  chemical  elements  into  constellations  of  electrons.  Thus, 
concrete  individuals  are  reduced  to  an  external  exemplification  of 
more  elemental  qualities;  and  the  latter,  in  turn,  to  spatial 
arrangements  of  elements  having  no  qualitative  differences  except 
physical  attraction  and  repulsion.  Thus  physical  or  mechanistic 
metaphysics  reduces  all  other  qualities,  and  hence  all  individuali- 
ties, to  variations  in  the  spatial  arrangements  of  units  having  only 
two  qualities — negative  signs  and  plus  signs  in  electricity.  The 
analytical  and  generalizing  activity  of  science  ends  in  the  elimina- 
tion of  all  individuality.  Since  individuality  thus  disappears 
before  the  destroying  hand  of  analytical  intelligence,  recent  phi- 
losophers, notably  William  James  and  H.  Bergson,  have  argued 
that  we  can  know  reality  only  by  abandoning  intelligence  or  reason 
and  laying  hold  on  it  through  intuition,  since  it  is  thus  that  we  ap- 
prehend individuality  in  ourselves  and  others.  This,  it  seems  to 
me,  is  a  poor  refuge,  based  on  a  one-sided  conception  of  the  nature 
of  intelligence  or  thought.     I  propose,  therefore,  to  consider  here 


174  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

what  the  relation  of  the  individual  is  to  the  universal  from  the 
point  of  view  of  reflection. 

Clearly,  the  individuating  interest  is  everywhere  in  evidence 
in  naive  thought,  action  and  feeling.  In  perceiving  and  interact- 
ing with  the  physical  order,  in  recognizing  and  holding  intercourse 
with  other  selves,  man  never  apprehends  a  general  quality  or  uni- 
versal, a  what  divorced  from  an  individuated  unity  of  qualities, 
or  that.  It  is  only  in  the  vague  and  rough  philosophizing  which 
consists  in  hypostatizing  abstractions  and  symbols  that  one  ever 
falls  into  the  error  of  thinking  that  any  sort  of  reality  can  be  an 
abstract  universal,  a  bare  whainess;  such  as  being  in  general,  color 
that  is  no  specific  color,  justice  that  is  no  specific  case  of  justice, 
etc.  The  realities  that  we  recognize  and  hold  intercourse  with  in 
thought  and  action,  that  we  appreciate  in  feeling,  are  always  de- 
terminate. The  selective  interests,  the  specific  desires  and  aims, 
which  motivate  action  and  thought  lead  to  the  individuation  of 
things.  Selective  individuating  interest  is  the  controlling  principle 
in  human  life.  The  world  of  his  experience  responds  to  man's 
individuating  interest.  It  presents  to  him  an  ascending  series  of 
individua ;  from  the  bare  particularity  of  the  grain  of  sand  or  dust, 
through  the  crystal  with  its  individuality  of  space  arrangement, 
and  the  unified  complexes  of  qualities  which  through  their  im- 
manent organizing  principle  constitute  plants  and  animals,  up  to 
man  himself  in  which  the  organizing  activity  is  in  part  controlled 
by  conscious  purpose. 

What  then  is  a  true  individual  ?  The  particular  is  frequently 
confused  with  the  individual.  The  former  connotes  the  merely 
isolated  single  object  in  its  bare  isolation,  the  mere  that  almost 
wholly  unqualified  by  relations.  The  individual  is  the  particular 
grasped  in  a  context,  and  as  a  unified  whole  of  various  qualities-in- 
relation ;  that  is,  as  a  system.  To  appreciate  the  individuality  of 
any  object  of  cognition  or  feeling  one  must  determine  its  character 
as  a  whole  in  terms  of  universals.  One  must  say  what  it  is.  The 
bare  particular  is  unmeaning  and  indescribable,  because  it  is  not 
grasped  as  a  concrete  union  of  different  universals.  Its  that  has 
no  what,  consequently  its  that  is  a  vanishing  point.  The  true  indi- 
vidual is  a  concretion  of  universals. 

A  true  individual  is  an  internal  or  immanent  unity  of  diverse 
properties,  with  self-activity  which  issues  in  self -maintenance  and 
self-development.    It  must  have  richness  or  complexity  of  qualities 


THE  PARTICULAR,  UNIVERSAL,  AND  INDIVIDUAL       175 

and  it  must,  as  a  unity,  own  these  diverse  qualities  in  some  degree 
of  harmony.  Unity-in-diversity  and  self-developing-activity  then 
are  the  indispensable  attributes  of  individuality.  Comprehensive- 
ness and  harmony  must  both  be  present.  It  is  evident  that  we  find 
these  characteristics  fully  manifest  only  in  conscious  beings,  that 
is,  in  selves.  An  immanent  dynamic  system  of  self-developing 
capacities  is  just  what  is  meant  by  the  teleological  unity  of  selfhood 
or  personality.  It  is  true  that  in  the  lives  of  selves  fixity  of  pur- 
pose and  unity  of  character  may  seem  to  be  sacrificed  by  wide 
diversity  of  interests  and  activities,  as  in  the  dilettante  pursuit  of 
art  and  letters ;  and  vice  versa,  breadth  and  variety  of  interests  by 
concentration  and  persistence  of  purpose  in  one  direction,  for 
example,  in  the  money  grubber.  But  genuine  harmony  is  not 
monotony.  It  is  the  organization  of  diversities  of  action,  feeling 
and  thought.  In  the  end  breadth  and  variety  of  interest  must 
bring  the  richer  individuality.  True  individuality  involves  in 
some  degree  universality  of  aim  and  interest.  The  self  becomes  a 
universe  in  little  by  seeking  universality,  in  the  sense  of  concrete 
organization  and  harmony  or  maximum  comprehensiveness  in  life 
and  experience. 

The  degree  of  individuality  possessed  by  any  being  is  the 
measure  of  its  worth.  The  principle  of  individuality  or  person- 
ality is  the  supreme  principle  of  value.  The  individual  is  the 
center  of  reference  for  interests  and  valuations  or  appreciations. 
It  is  very  obvious  that  our  vital  interests  in  social  life  are  in  indi- 
viduals ;  in  brother  and  sister,  lover  and  wife,  friend  and  enemy, 
colleague  and  neighbor. 

Masses  of  men  interest  us  only  as  actual  or  potential  groups  of 
individual  agents.  A  political  speaker  or  a  preacher  is  interested 
in  a  mass  meeting  only  as  a  group  of  individuals  who  will 
react  favorably  to  argument,  emotional  appeal,  and  suggestion. 
Churches,  political  parties,  social,  scientific,  and  literary  move- 
ments, are  individualities  of  more  comprehensive  type  inclusive  of 
a  plurality  of  persons.  In  art,  in  the  drama,  in  fiction  and  history, 
the  controlling  interest  is  always  in  the  presentation  either  of  the 
character  of  single  individuals  or  of  the  spiritual  and  significant 
unity  of  more  inclusive  systems  of  individuality.  Shakespeare's 
Hamlet  or  Tempest,  Goethe's  Faust,  Dante's  Divine  Comedy, 
Milton's  Paradise  Lost — these  are  all  types  of  spiritual  individual 
wholes.    Their  universal  significance  is  contained  in  their  spiritual 


176  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

unity  or  harmony  of  feeling  and  action.  The  controlling  interest 
in  history  is  in  the  individual  actor  in  his  unique  social  and 
political  relations;  Julius  Caesar,  Napoleon  the  First,  Luther,  or 
Bismarck;  the  unique  social  or  spiritual-historical  movement, 
Roman  Imperialism,  the  French  Revolution,  the  Origins  of  Chris- 
tianity, the  Protestant  Reformation,  the  European  Renaissance; 
the  unique  fortunes  of  individual  nations,  Ancient  Greece,  Eng- 
land, France,  the  United  States.  A  great  work  of  art,  a  historical 
culture-movement,  a  political  development,  a  religion,  is  significant 
just  because  it  is  a  comprehensive  unity,  a  living  organization  of 
spiritual  life,  a  superpersonal  life.  The  general  tendencies,  laws 
or  forces,  of  life  and  history  have  actuality  only  as  they  are  con- 
creted in  the  individual  whole,  in  selves  and  systems  of  selves. 
In  every  field  the  universal  has  the  function  of  defining  and 
expressing  the  relationships  of  individual  elements  in  individual 
systems  or  complexes.  The  individual,  out  of  reference  to  a  sys- 
tematic whole,  becomes  a  barren  and  insignificant  particular.  The 
universal  not  concreted  in  individuals  is  nought  but  an  equally 
barren  abstraction,  a  mere  abstract  general  notion.  To  sunder  the 
what  or  universal  from  the  that  or  specific  reality  is  to  deprive  the 
latter  of  all  meaning  and  value  and  the  former  of  all  existence. 
The  real  is  always  the  significant  individual,  the  immanent  unity 
of  diverse  qualities  and  relations,  and  the  world-whole  is  the  all- 
inclusive  and  richest  individuality. 

It  is  often  said  that  thought  cannot  grasp  the  individual  and 
unique,  since  thought  is  discursive  in  operation.  It  abstracts  and 
generalizes.  It  must  thus  sunder  the  ivhat  from  the  that.  If 
therefore  the  real  be  individual,  thought  can  never  grasp  its 
essence.  We  may  then,  perhaps,  feel  or  intuit  reality,  but  we  can 
never  comprehend  it,  since  to  do  this  we  must  distill  and  evaporate 
the  individual  and  unique  into  the  general  or  common.  Emotion 
and  intuition  are  the  sole  individuating  functions  of  mind,  we  are 
told,  and  all  intelligent  thinking  must  lag  behind  them.  I  cannot 
admit  this  severance  of  thought  and  feeling,  of  intellection  and 
immediate  experience.  The  development  of  feeling  and  volition 
is  conditioned  by  the  organizing  activity  of  thought.  Through 
reflection  feelings  becomes  more  articulate  and  significant. 
Through  thought  conation  becomes,  in  place  of  random  impulse, 
the  persistent  and  more  harmonious  development  of  purposive 
volitional  unity.     Thought  does  not  function  in  the  blue  ether,  it 


THE  PARTICULAR,  UNIVERSAL,  AND  INDIVIDUAL       177 

does  not  wing  itself  through  the  inane.  In  all  genuine  cognitive 
thinking  there  is  an  intuitive  factor.  Reflective  comprehension 
does  not  descend  from  heaven  upon  immediate  experience.  The 
former  grows  out  of  the  latter  and  is  inextricably  interwoven 
therewith.  I  know  myself,  and  I  know  other  selves,  through  the 
constructive  interpretation  of  immediate  experience.  Instead  of 
contrasting  and  separating  intelligence  and  intuition,  as  Bergson 
does,  I  would  maintain  that  they  cannot  properly  be  divorced. 
Both  in  cognition  and  conation,  intelligence  and  intuition  are  com- 
plementary factors.  The  great  scientist  has  not  less  but  much  more 
intuitive  insight  than  the  clodhopper.  The  great  poet  has  not  less 
but  more  intuitive  vision  than  the  hack  writer.  The  great  states- 
man has  not  less  but  more  intuition  of  the  political  nature  of  man 
than  the  ward  boss.  In  every  case  the  more  is  due  to  the  more 
intimate  interfusion  of  reflective  intelligence  and  immediate  ex- 
perience. As  Kant  put  it,  percepts  without  concepts  are  blind. 
But  does  not  science  deliberately  abstract  from  the  individual, 
and  treat  it  merely  as  an  example  of  the  universal,  a  junction-point 
of  concepts  or  laws  ?  Matter,  motion,  energy,  ether,  natural  selec- 
tion, gravitation,  with  their  more  specific  subsidiary  formulae — 
are  not  all  these  categories  of  science  purely  abstract  general  con- 
ceptions to  which  the  individual  is  wholly  indifferent  ?  Is  not  the 
quest  for  laws  of  connection  and  sequence  a  search  for  the  universal 
and  a  neglect  of  the  particular  ?  For  example,  must  not  history, 
in  order  to  become  scientific,  relinquish  the  depiction  and  interpre- 
tation of  so-called  great  personalities  as  creative  centers  in  the 
historical  life ;  cease  to  regard  so-called  great  creative  periods  such 
as  the  Periclean  age  of  Greece,  the  Renaissance  and  Protestant 
Reformation,  as  having  more  inherent  significance  or  mental 
causality  than  any  other  section  of  history  of  the  same  length  of 
time ;  and  become  "sociological"  by  showing  that  all  such  person- 
alities and  individual  movements  are  but  the  inevitable  resultants 
of  universal  forces  such  as  economic  and  climatic  factors  ?  Will 
not  the  history  of  the  future  become  a  deductive  science  in  which 
the  individual  will  be  viewed  and  explained  simply  as  a  junction 
point  of  sociological  laws  and  formulae  ?  I  am  not  concerned  here 
to  discuss  the  proper  methods  and  province  of  history,  but  I  wish 
to  point  out  that  the  economic,  geographical,  and  climatic  factors 
in  history  have  themselves  individual  characters  and  significance 
in  relation  to  the  psychical  factors.     The  physical  and  economic 


178  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

factors  of  social  life  themselves  undergo  changes  which  are  impli- 
cated with  the  whole  mental  movement  of  man  in  history. 

It  is  true  that  physics  and  chemistry  operate  with  (approx- 
imately) fixed  constants  and  regard  their  facts  as  constellations 
of  particulars  rather  than  as  unitary  individuals.  The  special 
sciences  may  be  classified  in  the  order  of  the  ascending  concrete- 
ness  or  individuality  of  their  respective  subject-matters.  Begin- 
ning with  terrestrial  and  solar  physics  the  most  "abstract"  or 
general  science,  we  have  next  chemistry,  which  deals  with  more 
specific  properties  of  bodies,  then  biology  whose  objects  have  more 
determinate  or  individual  character,  then  psychology  whose  ob- 
jects are  the  highly  individuated  bodies  in  which  consciousness 
is  predominant,  then  the  social  and  historical  sciences  of  culture 
(general  history,  the  comparative  study  of  morals,  politics,  re- 
ligion, and  art)  which  deal  with  the  most  concrete  and  spiritual 
types  of  historical  individualities.  Finally,  we  have  systematic 
ethics,  aesthetics,  philosophy  of  religion,  and  metaphysics,  which 
are  concerned  with  the  ultimate  significance  of  spiritual  individu- 
ality. This  contrast,  however,  does  not  mean  that  physics  has 
no  concern  with  the  individual  character  of  reality  and  the  cul- 
ture sciences  no  concern  with  generalization.  It  means  rather 
that  the  individual  fact  of  physics  is  more  abstract  or  poorer  in 
its  qualities  and  relations  than  the  individual  facts  of  history, 
the  human  social  order,  the  moral  life,  the  aesthetical  or  religious 
experience.  The  order  of  the  sciences  corresponds  to  the  increas- 
ing richness  and  concrete  significance  and  value  of  their  objects. 
The  world  of  the  physical  and  biological  sciences  is  too  a  world 
with  a  determinate  individual  character  and  evolution.  It  is  in 
reality  a  historical  world  of  a  lower  order.  For  example,  the 
study  of  radio-active  manifestations  and  the  law  of  Mendelyeev 
suggest  that  the  chemical  elements  have  had  a  history  with  a  de- 
terminate evolution.  The  second  law  of  thermo-dynamics  indi- 
cates that  the  solar  energy  has  a  determinate  history,  a  specific 
individuality  of  its  own.  The  various  theories  of  the  evolution 
of  the  solar  system,  of  the  earth,  and  of  life  on  the  earth,  involve 
determinate  histories  of  individual  wholes  of  increasing  com- 
plexity and  inclusiveness.2 

It  is  a  misconception  of  science  to  say  that  its  sole  aim  is  to 

2  On  the  whole  subject  of  history  and  individuality  compare,  Heinrieh 
Kickert,  Die  Grenzen  der  naturwissenschaftlichen  Begriffsbildung .  Zweite 
Auflage. 


THE  PARTICULAR,  UNIVERSAL,  AND  INDIVIDUAL       179 

establish  general  formulas  or  laws  which  shall  express  the  bare 
identities  of  objects  whose  differences  are  negligible.  The  par- 
ticular facts  of  chemistry  or  biology  are  not  adequately  under- 
stood, if  they  are  viewed  simply  as  repetitions  of  similarities  in 
quality  and  behavior.  This  may  be  the  goal  of  pure  mechanics. 
But  even  in  mathematical  physics  the  aim  is  the  formulation  of 
differential  equations  for  motion  and  other  forms  of  continuous 
physical  change. 

The  particular  fact  when  seen  in  its  relations  then  first  be- 
comes a  scientific  fact.  Science  does  not  consist  in  collecting 
particulars ;  this  is  but  its  preliminary  spade-work.  The  inter- 
pretation of  the  particular  in  the  light  of  universals  is  the  goal 
of  science.  In  other  words,  it  is  the  particular  become  individ- 
ualized, through  taking  its  place  in  a  cognitive  system  or  having 
membership  in  a  organized  whole.  One  who  has  only  an  "ab- 
stract" or  "general"  notion  of  energy,  or  gravitation  or  electricity 
has  not  a  genuinely  scientific  conception  of  these  things.  Recog- 
nition of  this  is  expressed  in  the  confession  of  relative  ignorance 
when  one  says,  "I  have  only  a  general  idea  of  the  subject."  To 
have  a  scientific  concept  of  anything  involves  a  knowledge  of  the 
varied  and  determinate  modes  of  behavior  of  the  thing  in  ques- 
tion, that  is,  the  laws  of  its  specific  transformations.  As  Lotze 
says,  the  concept  of  anything  is  the  law  of  its  states.  The  truly 
scientific  concept  of  energy,  for  example,  is  filled  in  with  knowl- 
edge of  how  energy  behaves  specifically  in  its  different  forms  and 
under  varying  conditions.  The  general  notion  is  a  short-hand 
expression  for  certain  basic  qualities  of  behavior  by  virtue  of 
which  individuals  constitute  an  ordered  group  system  or  series. 
The  concept  man  or  mammal  is  not  a  mere  extract  of  repeated 
similars  or  bare  identities  in  a  class  of  objects.  It  is  a  principle 
of  relation  which  expresses  at  once  the  differentiation  of  the 
group  which  it  designates,  from  hear  but  contrasting  groups,  and 
the  identity  or  continuity  of  features  which,  as  specified  in  the 
individual  members  of  this  group,  constitute  it  a  significant  serial 
totality.  The  universals  which  define  individuals  and  groups  are 
the  laws  of  systematic  series,  functions  of  thought  which  express 
the  order  of  relations  by  which  individuals  are  members  of  more 
comprehensive  wholes. 

A  human  person  becomes  not  less  but  more  individualized  and 
significant  when  he  is  found  to  be  describable  in  many  relations 


180  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

or  imiversals.  To  know  a  man  as  a  worker  in  a  certain  field,  a 
citizen,  a  husband  and  father,  a  lover  of  poetry  and  art,  a  sports- 
man, a  churchman,  a  friend,  is  to  know  him  infinitely  better  than 
simply  as  a  nodding  acquaintance  or  even  a  business  associate. 
In  place  of  seeing  him  as  a  vague  particular  or  unit,  when  I  come 
to  know  him  in  all  these  relations  he  becomes  a  more  concrete  uni- 
versal, a  truer  individual. 

There  is  no  doubt  that  it  is  the  self-intuition  of  one's  own 
individuality  and  one's  selective  purposive  interest  that  is  the 
subjective  spring  of  individuation  in  one's  intercourse  with  the 
world.  On  the  other  hand,  it  is  equally  true  to  say  that  one's 
intuition  of  one's  own  individuality  is  defined,  and  one's  purposive 
activity  is  determined,  through  the  give  and  take  of  social  inter- 
course by  way  of  action  and  passion  with  other  individualities. 
The  development  of  cognition,  conation,  and  feeling  in  the  self 
is  the  growth  of  the  individual  in  a  world  of  individuals.  Only 
as  member  of  a  universe  of  individuals  does  the  single  self  come 
into  his  own.  The  progressive  definition  or  determination  of  the 
self  is  the  progressive  discovery,  through  action,  thought  and  feel- 
ing, of  a  world  of  individuals.  The  movement  towards  richer  and 
more  harmonious  individuality  or  personality  is,  I  shall  aim  to 
show  more  fully  later  in  the  discussion,  the  meaning  of  the  world 
process.  This  meaning  is  realized  through  its  exemplification  in 
a  multitude  of  selves  which,  as  individuals  in  relation,  are  mem- 
bers of  a  higher  individuality  or,  if  you  will,  of  a  superindividu- 
ality.  It  would,  however,  be  misleading  to  say  that  the  ultimate 
reality,  or  the  universe  in  its  totality,  is  an  all-inclusive  individ- 
ual or  the  absolute  individual.  That  would  imply  that  the  rela- 
tion of  finite  selves  to  the  absolute  individual  is  simply  that  of 
parts  to  the  whole.  Ultimate  reality  at  its  highest  level  must 
be  a  society  of  selves  or  persons,  whose  ground  and  pattern,  may 
be  indeed,  a  supreme  individual  or  self,  but  whose  members,  havT 
ing  relative  self-activity  are  related  to  that  self  not  as  parts  of 
his  being  but  as  offspring  of  his  creative  activity,  endowed  with 
the  capacity  to  live  in  relations  to  him  analogous  to  their  relations 
to  other  finite  members  of  the  whole  society. 

The  finite  individual  is  a  dependent  but  active  center  of 
reality,  able  progressively  to  harmonize  his  inner  being,  and  there- 
with his  relations  with  other  finite  members  of  the  ultimate  so- 
ciety and  with  the  source  and  ground  of  the  whole. 


CHAPTER  XV 


SUBSTANCE 


The  most  far-reaching  distinction  made  with  respect  to  the  data 
of  experience  is  between  persons  and  things.  This  distinction 
has  grown  out  of  a  distinction  between  living  beings  and  nonliving 
things.  These  distinctions  were  not  made  in  primitive  thinking. 
For  early  man,  as  for  the  child,  there  was  no  clear  separation  to 
be  drawn  between  inanimate  and  animate  objects ;  nor,  among 
animate  objects,  between  persons  and  living  beings  who  are  not 
persons.  The  primitive  philosophy  is  animistic,  or  to  use  Mr. 
Marett's  term,  animaiistic.  (Zooism,  meaning  that  all  things  are 
alive  is  a  better  term  for  the  primitive  world  view.)  We  are  not 
concerned  here  with  the  genetic  question  how  these  distinctions 
came  to  be  made,  nor  are  we  at  present  concerned  with  the  ques- 
tion of  their  ultimate  validity.  Our  present  concern  is  with  the 
problem:  how  are  we  to  think  "things"  consistently,  and  this 
problem  will  lead  us  directly  into  the  problem  of  substance. 

The  thing  is  a  determinate  complex  of  qualities.  An  apple, 
for  instance,  consists  of  a  determinate  roundness,  redness,  texture, 
savor,  cohering  by  being  present  together  in  one  space-time  con- 
figuration. What  we  call  a  "thing"  is  relative  to  our  interests. 
An  apple  is  one  thing  for  the  buyer  and  eater.  An  apple  seed 
is  a  thing  for  the  orchardist.     Its  cells  are  things  for  the  botanist. 

The  unity  of  the  thing  is  conceived  after  the  analogy  of  the 
unity  of  the  self  in  recognizing  the  thing.  For,  just  as  the  self 
is  believed  to  have  certain  permanent  interests  and  a  consequent 
unity  and  continuity  of  being,  known  through  memory  and  re- 
flection, which  unity  and  continuity  persist  through  varying  cir- 
cumstance; so  a  thing  is  a  persisting  unity  of  diverse  qualities. 
Indeed,  the  recognition  of  the  unity  of  diverse  qualities  which  con- 
stitutes the  thing,  is  quite  dependent  upon  the  unity  and  continuity 
of  the  self's  interest  therein  and  attention  thereto.  Hence,  there 
is  no  logical  difference  between  the  problems  of  the  relation  of 

181 


182  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

the  unity  of  the  thing  to  the  diversity  of  its  qualities  and  of  the 
continuity  of  the  thing  through  the  changes  in  its  qualities,  and 
the  problems  of  the  unity  of  the  self  amidst  the  diversity  of  its 
experiences  and  of  the  continuity  of  the  self  through  its  chang- 
ing experiences. 

Ever  since  Plato,  dialecticians  have  exercised  their  subtlety 
on  these  problems.  It  will  suffice  here  to  note  briefly  what  the 
problems  are  and  how  they  lead  into  the  problem  of  substance  and 
the  various  solutions  thereof.1  First,  what  is  the  relation  of  the 
thing  to  its  qualities  ?  What  is  the  relation  of  the  thinghood  of 
the  apple  to  its  roundness,  redness,  sweetness,  etc.  ?  If  the  apple 
thing  is  just  roundness  plus  redness  plus  sweetness,  etc.,  then  the 
distinction  between  the  thing  and  its  qualities  vanishes.  If  the 
apple  thing  is  not  the  empirical  quality-complex  but  a  substrate 
underneath  and  supporting  the  qualities,  then  we  must  have  a 
relation  to  unite  the  qualities  with  the  thing.  But  if  the  relation, 
r,  is  something  between  the  real  thing  and  the  empirical  qualities, 
then  we  must  think  a  relation  r1,  to  unite  r  with  the  thing  and 
another  relation  r2  to  unite  r  with  the  qualities;  and  there  is  no 
end  to  this  process  of  assuming  relations  to  relate  relations  that 
are  between  other  relations.  Thus,  the  more  thoroughly  we  try 
to  think  out  the  relation  of  the  thing-substance  or  substrate  to 
its  qualities,  the  wider  apart  they  fly.  We  have  set  out  upon 
the  endless  regress  and  we  never  can  get  the  two  terms  of  our 
naive  proposition,  "the  thing  is  the  union  of  its  qualities,"  together. 

Again,  redness  is  not  roundness  and  neither  redness  nor  round- 
ness is  sweetness;  how  then  can  they  all  cohere  in  one  thing? 
Furthermore,  the  qualities  of  the  thing  change ;  the  apple  grows, 
ripens,  decays,  or  is  eaten  and  ceases  to  be  an  apple;  but  when 
does  it  cease  to  be  an  apple  ?  In  Mr.  Bradley's  illustration :  Sir 
John  Suckling's  silk  stockings  were  darned  with  black  silk  yarn 
until  there  was  nothing  of  the  original  green  silk  left ;  were  they 
still  the  same  stockings?     How  can  a  thing  preserve  its  identity 


1For  recent  discussions  of  these  problems  see  F.  H.  Bradley,  Appearance 
and  Reality,  especially  Chaps.  1,  2,  3,  and  8;  A.  E.  Taylor,  Elements  of  Meta- 
physics, Book  i,  Chap.  4;  William  James;  A  Pluralistic  Universe,  Appendix 
A,  "The  Thing  and  its  Relations";  J.  Royce;  The  World  and  the  Individual, 
Vol.  I,  especially  Lecture  iii;  Lotze,  Metaphysics,  Book  i,  Chaps.  1,  2,  3,  4; 
The  Logic  of  Hegel,  translated  by  Wallace,  especially  pp.  232  ff . ;  also  pp.  273 
ff. ;  Alexander,  Space,  Time  and  Deity,  Vol.  I,  Book  ii,  Chaps.  6  and  10  and 
Vol.  II,  passim. 


SUBSTANCE  183 

through  change  of  qualities,  if  it  be  but  the  sum  of  its  qualities  ? 
If  it  be  not  the  sum  of  its  qualities,  is  it  anything  whatsoever? 
Briefly,  if  the  thing  is  idenjtical  with  its  qualities,  it  is  not  a  thing- 
substance  and  there  are  no  qualities,  since  there  can  be  no  dis- 
tinction without  relation,  no  qualities  without  distinction  from 
and  relation  to  one  another  and  to  the  thing  which  owns  them; 
no  thing  without  distinction  from  and  relation  to  its  qualities. 
On  the  other  hand,  if  the  thing  be  not  identical  with  its  qualities, 
then  the  thing  is  a  meaningless  abstraction,  an  unknown  mysteri- 
ously supporting  the  qualities. 

The  argument  that  a  thing  cannot  exist  as  a  complex  of  qual- 
ities, since  each  quality  is  other  than  or  different  from  every  other, 
is  a  mere  quibble,  if  it  be  taken  to  mean  anything  more  than  that 
the  qualities  of  empirical  things  are  recognized  only  as  discrimi- 
nated and  related  to  one  another.  No  determinate  quality,  and 
no  group  of  determinate  qualities,  is  known  except  in  relation  to 
others.  Empirical  reality  is  a  system  or  totality  of  qualities  in 
relation.  Furthermore,  it  is  impossible  to  conceive  reality  as  a 
whole  in  any  other  form  than  that  of  a  system  of  determinately 
qualified  beings  in  relation.  If  we  are  led,  when  we  think  out 
the  logical  implications  of  experience,  to  the  notion  of  one  world 
ground  or  cosmical  order,  that  too  can  only  be  conceived  as 
one  ground  or  order  in  the  sense  of  being  the  systematic  totality, 
the  unitary  ground,  of  finite  beings  in  relation.  Thus  the  abso- 
lute is  nothing  more  than  the  totality  of  the  related.  Such  is  the 
legitimate  argument  of  the  dialectic  of  experience. 

To  return  to  the  problem  of  the  thing  and  its  qualities,  a 
"thing"  is  a  name  and  a  concept  for  an  empirical  complex  of 
qualities.  "Apple"  is  a  name  for  the  coherence  in  one  space- 
configuration  for  several  moments  of  time  of  a  complex  of  sense 
qualities,  or  the  persistence  in  time  of  the  coherence  of  this  complex 
in  a  series  of  positions.  "Apple"  is  a  conceptual  name,  because 
there  are  several  instances  of  a  similar  coherence  of  similar  qual- 
ities in  various  places  and  in  various  times.  These  cohering 
qualities  which  are  an  apple  have  specific  meanings  for  human 
interests  and  purposes.  So  long  as  the  qualities  persist  in  a  degree 
sufficient  to  satisfy  these  interests  and  purposes,  we  call  it  the 
same  thing,  and  several  same  things  are  the  same  hind  of  thing. 
When  the  apple  ceases  to  be  edible  and  salable  it  ceases,  for  those 
purposes,  to  be  an  apple.     When  its  seeds  cease  to  function  as 


184  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

seeds,  they  cease  to  be  seeds.  Thus,  the  continuous  unity  and 
identity  of  the  thing  consists  in  the  unity  and  continuity  of  its 
empirical  functions  in  relation  to  the .  interests  and  purposes  of 
men  as  perceiving,  desiring,  acting  and  thinking  beings.  Hence, 
so  long  as  you  can  treat  a  thing  as  the  same,  for  that  purpose  it  is 
the  same.  Thus  a  "thing"  is  a  teleological  or  pragmatic  con- 
struction, by  the  mind,  of  the  complex  data  of  actual  experience. 
Ultimate  things  or  substances  could  only  be  those  which  satisfied 
the  most  fundamental  and  enduring  purposes  of  human  thought 
and  action,  or  which  constituted  the  final  limit  to  analytic  thought. 
If  there  be  any  purpose  in  human  thought  which  is  most  basic 
and  all-inclusive,  and  if  there  be  any  concept  of  substance  which 
satisfies  or  is  the  limit  of  fulfillment  of  that  purpose,  this  will 
be  the  ultimate  concept  of  being. 

The  concept  of  substance  has  its  source  in  the  quest  for  a 
concept  of  essential  being.  It  was  developed  to  satisfy  the  de- 
mand of  thought  for  a  permanent  type  of  being.  There  are  two 
correlative  notions  involved  in  all  concepts  of  substance:  (1)  The 
notion  of  a  permanent  or  enduring  reality  as  the  ultimate  ground 
or  subject  of  the  ever-changing  complexes  of  empirical  qualities. 
The  incessant  alterations  in  the  qualitative  complexes  which  are 
empirical  things  are  conceived  to  be  expressions  or  manifestations 
of  a  being  which  endures  through  all  its  changing  expressions. 
(2)  The  notion  of  a  self-subsistent  or  self-existent  reality;  of  a 
reality  which,  as  self-existent  or  self-caused,  is  permanent. 

Empirical  things  are  always  dependent  on  their  others.  They 
have  their  transitory  existences  only  as  determined  by  the  status 
and  movement  of  all  other  finite  beings.  Now  clearly,  perma- 
nence and  self-existence  are  correlative  notions.  Only  that  which 
is  self-existent  can  endure  permanently,  and  that  which  endures 
permanently  must  be  self-existent.  When  a  concept  of  substance 
is  formed,  the  changing  complex  of  empirical  qualities  are  thought 
of  as  its  attributes  or  properties.  It  is  the  essence  of  which  they 
are  the  appearances,  the  reality  of  which  they  are  the  manifesta- 
tions; the  ultimate  subject  of  all  predicates. 

The  logic  of  Greek  philosophy  reveals  clearly  the  motives,  and 
logically  possible  points  of  view,  in  regard  to  substance.  These 
are:  substance  is  one  or  many  in  number,  and  one  or  more  in 
kind.  In  early  Greek  philosophy  substance  is  conceived  to  be  one 
in  kind,  it  is  living  matter  (water,  air,  fire).     Anaxagoras,  who 


SUBSTANCE  185 

is  a  qualitative  as  well  as  a  quantitative  pluralist,  conceives  it 
to  be  many  in  number  and  many  in  kind.  The  atomists,  who 
are  quantitative  pluralists  but  qualitative  monists,  conceive  that 
there  are  many  instances  of  the  one  kind  of  substance.  Plato's 
Ideas  are:  a  plurality  of  substantial  beings  and  a  unifying  or 
governing  principle,  the  idea  of  the  good.  Thus  Plato  combines 
pluralism  and  singularism.  The  ideas  are  the  true  substances, 
but  a  dubious  sort  of  being  is  given  to  matter,  so  that  there  is 
a  dualistic  strain  in  Plato  and,  more  strongly,  in  Aristotle.  Aris- 
totle holds  that  the  individual,  who  is  the  actual  union  of  form 
and  matter,  the  realized  entelechy,  is  the  essential  being  [to  ti 
en  einai]  or  substance.  Thus,  for  Aristotle,  there  is  a  plurality 
of  real  substances.  But  this  plurality  has  its  goal  in  the  seeking 
of  the  individual  to  become  like  the  one  perfect  entelechy,  the 
unmoved  mover  of  all  things.  Aristotle,  like  Plato,  gives  to 
matter  or  potentiality,  a  quasi  self-subsistence. 

In  modern  philosophy  Spinoza  is  both  a  qualitative  monist 
(in  other  words  his  is  a  double-aspect  theory)  and  a  quantitative 
singularist;  there  is  one  self -existent  all-inclusive  being,  one  sub- 
stance or  God.  For  the  dualists,  Descartes  and  Locke,  there  are 
two  kinds  of  substance,  matter  and  mind ;  for  the  materialist, 
Hobbes,  there  are  two  kinds  of  substance,  matter  and  motion; 
for  the  spiritualist,  there  is  one  kind  of  substance,  spirit  or  mind. 
Berkeley  and  Leibniz  are  spiritualistic  pluralists.  For  them 
reality  consists  of  a  plurality  of  psychical  centers  or  monads; 
whatever  unity  there  is  in  the  universe  is  due  to  the  interaction 
of  the  monads.  Berkeley's  pluralism  ends  in  an  idealistic  theism. 
Leibniz  said  that  the  interaction  was  only  apparent  in  the  in- 
terrelations of  the  monads,  which  was  the  consequence  of  a  har- 
mony preestablished  by  God.  Later  thinkers  who  start  from  per- 
sonalistic  pluralism,  such  as  Lotze  and  James  Ward,  have  dis- 
carded this  conception  of  the  windowless  monad  and  admit  direct 
interaction  implying  a  common  ground  or  medium.  Lotze's 
pluralism  ends  in  a  singularism  very  like  pantheism ;  Ward  is  a 
theist.  Fichte  and  Hegel,  like  Leibniz,  attempt  to  harmonize  the 
motives  of  singularistic  and  pluralistic  spiritualism.  When  the 
pluralist  regards  the  interrelations  of  the  many  finite  centers  as 
implying  an  absolute  ground,  he  ceases  to  be  a  simon-pure  pluralist, 
and  becomes  in  some  degree  a  singularist.  Indeed,  the  controversy 
between  pluralism  and  singularism  is  really  a  question  as  to  where 


186  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

the  emphasis  is  to  be  strongest,  on  the  distinctness  of  the  many  be- 
ings, or  on  their  unity.  The  singularist  tends  to  slur  the  unique- 
ness and  privacy  of  the  finite  self  and  the  pluralist  emphasizes  it. 
William  James,  Howison,  McTaggart,  F.  C.  S.  Schiller,  H.  C. 
Sturt  and  others  in  the  volume  Personal  Idealism;  in  France, 
C.  B.  Renouvier,  Henri  Bergson  and  others;  and  in  Germany, 
L.  W.  Stern  are  recent  exponents  of  spiritualistic  or  personalistic 
pluralism;  Josiah  Royce,  F.  H.  Bradley  and  B.  Bosanquet,  of 
spiritualistic  singularism.2  Modern  materialists  are  atomistic  or 
pluralistic  in  their  emphasis,  but  the  doctrine  that  the  one  sub- 
stance is  the  continuous  space-filling  ether,  of  which  all  atoms 
are  transformations  and  transitory  modifications  would  be  a  ma- 
terialistic singularism. 

We  are  not  concerned  here  with  the  question  whether  all 
reality  is  of  one  or  more  than  one  kind.  That  question  we  shall 
discuss  later  on.3  Our  present  concern  is  with  the  logical  value 
of  the  notion  of  substance  for  an  interpretation  of  reality  as  a 
whole. 

The  classical  criticisms  of  Locke  and  Hume  on  the  notion  of 
substance  4  are  presented  to-day  from  a  new  angle — the  notion  of 
substance  is  that  of  a  meaningless  reduplication  of  the  properties 
or  attributes  which  are  supposed  to  inhere  in  it.  If  the  perma- 
nent self-existing  substance  be  not  identical  with  its  attributes, 
it  is  nothing  conceivable  and  the  relation  between  it  and  its  at- 
tributes is  inconceivable.  Thus  the  substance  idea  is  superfluous. 
If  substance  be  simply  a  name  for  the  sum  of  its  attributes  it  is 
then  neither  permanent  nor  self-existing.  Experience  does  not 
acquaint  us  with  any  entity  that  is  absolutely  permanent  or  self- 
existent.  Experience  is  a  realm  of  ceaseless  flux,  and  the  only 
permanencies  or  invariants  that  science  finds  in  it  are  those  of 
relations  of  functional  interdependence  among  its   data.      Sub- 

2  It  should  be  added,  however,  that  spiritualistic  or  idealistic  singularists 
do  not  deny  a  relative  reality  to  the  human  individual ;  but  Bradley  and  Bosan- 
quet are  very  dubious  about  according  to  the  human  person  any  permanent 
place  in  the  cosmic  scheme.  This  is  not  at  all  the  case  with  Royce  who  has 
made  the  bravest  attempt  of  them  all  to  save  the  individuality  and  permanent 
place  of  the  person  in  the  absolute  self.  In  his  later  works  Royce  laid  in- 
creasing stress  on  the  notion  of  the  absolute  as  a  community  of  persons.  My 
own  view  is  nearest  to  his. 

•See  Chaps.  21  and  27. 

4  See  Locke,  Essay,  Book  ii,  Chaps.  23  and  24;  Hume,  Treatise,  Book  I, 
Part  iv,  Sec.  3-6. 


SUBSTANCE  187 

stantiality  or  permanence,  says  Cassirer,5  "signifies  the  relative 
self-dependence  of  determinate  parts  of  a  functional  system ;  that, 
in  comparison  with  others,  prove  independent  moments."  And  a 
functional  relation  is  a  correlation  between  series  of  empirical 
data.  The  contents  of  experience  are  ever  changing,  but,  in  so  far 
as  we  are  able  to  find  or  put  law  or  order  in  their  sequence,  and 
thus  group  the  changing  contents  into  series,  we  arrive  at  the 
only  sort  of  permanence  and  subsistence  that  scientific  thought 
can. get  and  use.6 

8 oulrsub stance,  conceived  as  the  permanent  and  self-existing 
support  of  the  empirical  processes  of  consciousness,  really  adds 
nothing  to  our  understanding  of  the  actual  self.  It  is  only  an 
embarrassing  superfluity.  The  more  closely  we  scan  the  actual 
history  of  selves^,  the  clearer  it  becomes  that  the  unity  and  con- 
tinuity of  the  empirical  self  is  that  of  the  fluctuating,  interrupted, 
and  episodic  memories,  feelings,  ideas,  and  purposes  that  cor- 
respond roughly  with  the  observed  bodily  processes.  If  the  soul 
be  unchanging,  it  does  not  act  for  the  changing  consciousness.  If 
the  soul  be  simply  the  relations  of  functional  dependence  or  order 
in  the  shifting  data  of  consciousness,  it  is  not  a  soul  substance. 

Material  substance  is  equally  useless  as  a  substrate  for  empir- 
ical physical  processes.  How  is  it  to  be  thought  of  ?  Does  it  pos- 
sess only  certain  so-called  primary  qualities,  mass,  figure  and  mo- 

6  Substanzbegriff  und  Funktionsbegriff,  p.  119. 

•Professor  Spaulding,  in  The  New  Rationalism  (pp.  29,  38  ff.,  70  ff., 
155  ff.,  etc.),  attributes  the  aberrations  of  philosophers  in  hunting  for  mare's 
nests,  or  in  dark  places  for  things  that  are  not  there,  chiefly  to  the  dominance 
of  the  ancient  Greek  concept  of  substance  as  a  "thinglike  core"  inside  the 
empirical  qualities.  Owing  to  the  baneful  influence  of  the  Greek  philosophers, 
the  thinglike  concepts  or  corelike  concepts  of  substance  and  cause  have  misled 
philosophers  ever  since  into  thinking  of  mind  and  body,  spirit  and  matter, 
as  thinglike  substances  and  causes  and  speculating  upon  their  relations.  Thus 
have  arisen  the  foolish  and  insoluble  riddles  of  the  opposition  of  spiritualism 
or  idealism,  materialism  and  dualism.  Philosophy  can  end  this  endless  and 
fruitless  debate  only  by  emancipating  itself  from  these  childlike  notions  and 
conceiving  reality  simply  as  a  functional  system  of  invariant  logical  relations 
between  the  varying  data  of  experience.  On  which  charter  of  freedom  and 
progress  for  philosophy  I  make  two  observations:  1.  Aristotle  analyzes  oiWa 
or  substance,  which  for  him  means  oevng,  and  finds  that  it  has  four  principal 
meanings,  rb  rl  tjv  etvai,  or  essential  being,  rb  KadbXov  or  the  universal,  rb  ^hos 
ovala  or  the  genus,  and  rb  ivoKelftevov  or  the  substrate.  He  identifies  being  or 
substance  with  the  individual  or  self-existent,  to  2k6.<jtov,  KdOdfrru;  this  is  the 
essential  being  or  subject  of  attributes,  not  a  thinglike  core.  It  is  the  union 
of  matter  and  form.  2.  Some  entity  or  entities  must  be  self -existent  or  perma- 
nent; whether  minds  and  bodies,  or  mind-bodies,  or  neutral  entities,  or  "an 
unearthly  ballet  of  bloodless"  relations,  this  is  not  the  place  to  consider. 


188  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

tion.  Then  how  can  we  account  for  the  secondary  qualities :  sound, 
color,  taste,  odor,  etc.  ?  How  do  the  primary  qualities  produce 
the  secondary  qualities?  If  the  latter  are  subjective,  inasmuch 
as  they  are  dependent  upon  the  reaction  of  the  percipient  organism 
to  the  impact  of  the  primary  qualities,  then  Berkeley's  reply  is 
in  point.7  Our  knowledge  of  the  primary  qualities  is  equally 
dependent  upon  the  reaction  of  the  organism.  The  primary  qual- 
ities are  only  relatively  less  changeable  than  the  secondary.  As 
empirical  data,  the  primary  and  secondary  qualities  are  on  the 
same  level.  The  primary  qualities,  supposed  to  be  the  attributes 
of  material  substance,  are  not  the  primary  qualities  experienced 
by  us.  They  are  either  primary  qualities  reduced  to  microscopic 
and  imperceptible  proportions;  or,  as  in  the  identification  of 
matter  with  ether,  everything  experiential  is  stripped  away,  leav- 
ing only  the  bare  notion  of  a  continuous  space  filled  with  nothing 
conceivable  or  imaginable.8 

Thus  material  substance  is  a  meaningless  abstraction  that  ac- 
counts for  nothing.  A  single  neutral  substance,  conceived  as  the 
underlying  identity  of  mind  and  matter,  in  which  are  pooled,  no 
one  knows  how,  the  attributes  of  matter-substance,  and  mind- 
substance,  is  an  even  more  empty  and  superfluous  notion. 

If  substance  be  the  unknown  support  of  known  qualities,  it  is 
a  useless  notion.  The  business  of  knowledge  is  to  establish  sys- 
tematic correlations  of  experiential  data.  Descriptive  laws  of 
qualitative  and  quantitative  similarities  and  dissimilarities  in  the 
empirical  sequences  of  series,  and  of  correspondences  between 
series  of  experiential  data,  constitute  the  whole  business  of  science. 
In  its  only  useful  sense,  substance  is  thus  a  misleading  name  for 
the  never-completed  sum  of  the  laws  of  functional  correlation  of 
experiential  data.  For  the  only  entities  that  are  permanent  are 
the  universals  and  values — in  short,  the  relations  which  we  find 
or  put  into  the  ceaseless  processes  and  which  give  them  connection 
or  meaning. 

And  yet,  so  irrepressible  is  the  hunger  of  the  mind  for  the 
concept  of  permanent  and  self-existing  entities,  that  we  find  sci- 


'  Cf.  Berkeley,  Principles  of  Human  Knowledge,  and  Three  Dialogues  he- 
tween  Hylas  and  Philonous. 

8  The  real  primary  qualities  are  only,  to  use  Loeke  's  term,  ' l  powers ' ' 
to  produce  in  the  moment  of  perception  the  experienced  primary  and  secondary 
qualities. 


SUBSTANCE  189 

entists,  after  driving  out  substance,  smuggle  it  in  again  under 
other  names.  The  atoms,  electrons,  ether,  etc.,  of  the  physicist ; 
the  elements  of  the  chemist ;  the  colloids,  protoplasms  and  cells  of 
the  biologist;  the  sensations,  affections,  and  reflex  arcs  of  the 
psychologist  are  substances;  and  there  is  an  inveterate  tendency 
to  hypostatize  even  the  more  general  descriptive  formulae  of  causal 
sequence  as  "laws  of  nature."  Even  such  tenuous  notions  as  uni- 
versals,  relations,  values,  are  hypostatized  under  other  names. 
The  Neo-realist,  for  example,  who  would  banish  substances  and 
causes,  and  eviscerate  their  content  into  logical  "terms"  and  "rela- 
tions" which  constitute  propositions  and  propositional  functions, 
says  that  these  bloodless  notions  subsist  although  they  do  not  exist. 
He  does  not  tell  us  what  they  subsist  on.  If  they  subsist  on  them- 
selves, they  are  simply  our  old  friends  the  substances  masquerad- 
ing under  other  names.     A  self-subsistent  entity  is  substantive.9 

The  truth  is,  as  Kant  said :  we  cannot  think  the  changing  with- 
out the  permanent.  There  must  be  something  which  changes  and 
if  change  is  orderly,  that  is  if  it  be  thinkable,  there  must  be  a 
ground  or  grounds  for  the  order  of  change.  Even  the  perpetual 
flux  and  movement  of  perceptual  experience  must  be  the  expres- 
sion of  the  orderly  interaction  of  real  entities.  Even  if  change 
were  illusory,  there  must  be  some  permanent  ground  for  this  uni- 
versal illusion.  Empirical  reality  is  the  way  in  which  things 
behave  around  us  and  in  us.  It  is  the  manifestation  of  a  system 
of  centers  of  activity  or  movement.  The  substantial  grounds  of 
experience  must  be  permanent  centers  of  activity  in  inter-rela- 
tion. This  is  not  the  place  to  consider  whether  all  real  beings  are 
of  one  kind.  The  concept  of  substance  as  an  inert  core  or  passive 
support  of  empirical  qualities  is  certainly  useless.  I  doubt  if 
any  important  philosopher  ever  held  it.  The  true  meaning  of 
substance  is  that  of  a  system  of  particular  centers  of  activity.  All 
motion  implies  activity. 

Since  experience  is  a  rich  complex  of  everchanging  but  orderly 
sequences  of  qualities  in  multifarious  relations  of  action  and  pas- 
sion, the  ground  of  experience  must  be  the  interaction  of  a  plu- 
rality of  interdependent  centers,  of  dynamic  individua.  These 
are  finite,  since  each  receives  from  the  others  limits  to  its  self- 


9  Of.  The  New  Realism  by  Perry  and  others ;  Bertrand  Eussell  's  writings ; 
Meinong's  writings  on  Gegenstandstheorie. 


190  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

activity  and  thus  suffers — that  is,  is  passive.  There  can  be  no 
determinate  changes  unless  there  are  determinate  beings  having 
determinate  transactions.  The  changing  complexes  of  experience 
express  their  interaction.  Whether  all  real  centers  of  activity 
are  reducible  to  one  type  (qualitative  monism)  is  a  problem  that 
I  shall  consider  later;  whether  all  finite  centers  of  activity  are 
parts  of  one  all-inclusive  active  principle  (dynamic  singularism)  ; 
or  whether  the  only  unity  is  that  of  the  system  of  interacting  finite 
beings  (dynamic  pluralism,  personalistic  and  otherwise)  ;  or 
whether  the  plurality  of  finite  centers  which  constitute  our  world 
have  their  ground  in  one  transcendent  creative  principle  (theistic 
monism)  will  be  considered  later  on.10  Here  it  is  sufficient  to 
say  that,  since  our  pluralistic  system  of  interacting  individua  con- 
sists of  finite  members,  strictly  speaking,  these  are  not  substances. 
Only  the  permanent  self-subsistent  ground  or  order  of  the  whole 
system  is  the  ultimately  substantial  or  self-subsistent  reality.  The 
substantial  is  not  something  that  mysteriously  abides  behind  the 
whole  complex  of  individua.  The  substantial  reality  is  either, 
just  the  living  order  or  system  of  the  plurality  of  finite  and  inter- 
related centers  of  action  and  passion,  or  the  transcendent  ground 
of  this  order  which,  as  known,  is  manifesting  itself  in  the  whole 
systematic  order  of  finite  centers. 

10  Part  v. 


CHAPER  XVI 


CHANGE    AND    CAUSALITY 


In  popular  thought  "cause"  means  something  which  produces 
something  else.  The  common  sense  belief  is  that  there  is  power  or 
activity  in  the  cause  to  bring  forth  the  effect.  The  source  of  this 
belief  is,  without  doubt,  the  feelings  of  personal  effort  or  activity 
and  resistance,  which  accompany  changes  produced  by  us,  in  our 
surroundings  and  by  our  surroundings  in  us. 

The  quest  for  causal  explanation  is  the  application  to  chang- 
ing experience  of  the  principle  of  sufficient  reason.  The  causal 
principle  is  an  a  priori  form  or  category  of  thought,  simply  in  the 
sense  that,  inasmuch  as  we  do  not  ourselves  act  without  ground 
or  reason,  we  suppose  there  must  be  a  ground  for  every  change 
in  the  world  around  us.  It  was  reasonable  for  primitive  man, 
who  had  not  an  accumulated  stock  of  carefully  analyzed  observa- 
tions in  regard  to  the  differences  between  the  modes  of  behavior 
of  physical  nature  and  human  nature,  to  suppose  that  whatever 
occurred  was  produced  by  some  animated  being  or  spirit  acting 
from  felt  motives.  The  scientific  notions  of  attraction  and  repul- 
sion are  ghostly  relics  of  animatism.  The  fundamental  distinc- 
tion which  has  been  made,  as  a  result  of  technical  control  and 
scientific  analysis,  between  mechanical  causation  and  final  causa- 
tion is  simply  that  between  unmotivated  and  motivated  causation. 
Teleological  interpretation  of  nature  is  simply  the  last  refinement 
of  animism  or  animatism.  We  still  use  the  same  term  to  designate 
changes  brought  about  by  inanimate  physical  agencies  and  by 
persons. 

Science  has  progressed,  in  exactness  of  procedure  and  the  suc- 
cessful control,  through  prediction,  of  natural  processes,  by  ban- 
ishing final  causes  from  the  study  of  nature.  Positive  science  does 
not  ask  why  anything  happens  in  the  physical  order,  but  how  it 
happens.  It  is  only  in  social  life,  in  history  which  is  the  at- 
tempted reproduction  of  the  social  life  of  the  past,  and  in  ethical 

191 


192  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

inquiries ;  in  other  words,  it  is  only  where  we  have  to  do  with  the 
attitudes  and  desires  of  persons  that  we  now  ask  why  anything 
happens.  The  precisest  possible  general  description  of  the  orderly 
sequence  of  actual  events  is  the  aim  of  natural  science.  For  it 
a  cause  is  a  uniform  antecedent,  without  which  the  type  of  event 
in  question  does  not  as  a  matter  of  fact  occur.  While  a  cause 
is  a  uniform  antecedent,  that  does  not  imply  that  causes  and 
effects  may  not  in  part  be  contemporaneous  and  reciprocating. 

The  aim  of  scientific  explanation  is  to  reduce  the  sequences 
of  events,  as  far  as  possible,  to  quantitative  ratios.  Science  does 
not  attempt  to  reproduce  the  course  of  the  actual  world  in  all  its 
bewildering  details.  It  makes  conceptual  abstractions  from  the 
teeming  complexity  of  fact.  Its  end  is  simplification  and  pre- 
cision of  statement,  for  the  sake  of  prevision  and  control.  It  is, 
therefore,  most  convenient  for  science  to  ignore  troublesome  ques- 
tions as  to  the  natures  of  causal  agencies ;  and  to  confine  itself  to 
the  description,  in  mathematical  terms,  of  the  functional  relations 
of  interdependence  among  the  data  of  experience.  In  his  book, 
Erhentniss  und  Irrtum,  Ernst  Mach  has  stated  very  clearly  the 
view  that  the  vulgar  concepts  of  cause  and  effect  are  useless  to 
express  the  functional  interrelationships  of  elements  in  any  com- 
plex phenomenon  of  change.  The  concept  of  function  expresses 
much  more  completely  and  precisely  the  mutual  dependence  of 
elements.  All  dependences  are  mutual,  and  the  general  permanence 
in  the  changing  relations  or  interdependences  among  empirical 
elements  are  to  be  expressed  as  functional  relations  or  equations 
between  the  elements.  For  example,  in  an  impersonal  complex 
ABCD,  A  may  vary  inversely  with  B,  C,  or  D,  or  directly  with 
B,  inversely  with  C,  etc.  The  problem  of  science  is  to  formulate 
differential  equations  for  these  correlative  variations. 

Thus,  the  chief  value  of  causal  explanation  lies  in  the  formu- 
lation of  approximate  regularities  or  orders  of  relation  between 
qualitatively  discontinuous  phenomena.1 

The  following  are  the  chief  philosophical  problems  in  regard 
to  the  notion  of  causation:  (1)  Is  the  notion  of  power  or  agency 
to  be  banished  entirely  from  our  conception  of  the  world,  or  has 
it  a  legitimate  place  in  philosophy?     (2)  What  is  the  legitimate 

1  On  the  notion  of  cause  as  functional  relation  see,  in  addition  to  Mach 
and  the  references  in  the  previous  chapter,  K.  Pearson,  Grammar  of  Science, 
third  edition ;   also  Avenarius,  Kritik  der  reinen  Erfahrung. 


CHANGE  AND  CAUSALITY  193 

meaning  of  the  postulate  of  the  uniformity  of  nature?  Must  like 
causes  always  have  like  effects  ?  Or  are  we  to  admit  a  so-called 
plurality  of  causes  and  effects,  which  would  be  to  admit  absolute 
contingency  into  the  heart  of  things.  (3)  The  problem  of  con- 
tinuity and  discreteness  or  novelty ;  in  what  sense  must  we  admit 
the  reality  of  novel  events  ?  (4)  How  are  we  to  conceive  the 
totality  of  causal  interrelations  ?  I  shall  now  take  up  these  prob- 
lems in  order. 

( 1 )  The  notion  of  power  or  agency  cannot  be  eliminated  from 
the  interpretation  of  experience  without  reducing  it  to  a  series  of 
groundless  and  inert  dissolving  views.  Since  there  is  change, 
there  is  agency.  There  is  a  great  gain,  in  simplifying  his  prob- 
lems, for  the  physical  scientist  to  banish  all  troublesome  questions 
as  to  the  nature  of  force,  agent,  activity;  but  clearly  our  richly 
diverse  and  mobile  world  is  dynamic.  Things  are  doing  in  it. 
Fire  is  an  agent,  since  it  burns  my  fingers  or  my  house.  Elec- 
tricity is  an  agent,  since  it  shocks  my  nerves  or  kills  me  and 
propels  trolley  cars.  The  quantities  for  which  the  differential 
equations  obtain  in  mathematical  physics  are  pure  quantities  with- 
out qualities.  The  world  of  experience  is  not  a  series  of  equations 
or  mathematical  functions.  It  is  not  an  unearthly  ballet  of  bloodless 
categories.  The  basic  reality  is  experience,  and  the  mathematical 
functions  of  the  exact  sciences  have  but  a  very  shadowy  resem- 
blance to  reality.  Since  the  self  is  both  a  doer  and  a  sufferer, 
it  must  suppose,  when  it  suffers  or  perceives  change,  that  some- 
thing acts. 

The  tendency  to  shy  off  from  questions  as  to  the  real  agents 
in  nature  is  a  consequence  of  the  lingering  influence  of  the  doc- 
trine of  mysterious  things-in-themselves  behind  phenomena.  Ac- 
tually, tilings  are  what  they  do.  Substances,  if  not  all  sentient, 
are  at  least  all  agents.  Life,  for  instance,  is  not  a  mysterious 
entity.  It  is  a  generic  term  for  multitudes  of  individua  which 
nourish  themselves,  respond  in  peculiar  ways  to  stimuli,  are  sen- 
tient and  mobile,  and  reproduce  their  kind. 

The  descriptive  formulae  of  science  state  the  uniformities  or 
orderly  relations  in  the  behavior  of  natural  entities.  But  these 
formulae  can  never  embrace  or  represent  adequately  the  course 
of  nature  in  its  concrete  complexity.  Scientific  laws  are  statistical 
averages  for  the  modes  of  behavior  of  large  numbers  of  individua. 
There  are  individual  differences  in  the  qualities  even  of  atoms  of 


194  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

the  same  chemical  substance,  as  instanced  in  isomerism  and  ap- 
parent exceptions  to  the  periodic  law.  The  differences  between 
such  minute  individua  may  be  explained,  as  in  the  electron 
theory,  through  differences  in  the  subindividua.  But  individual 
differences  are  not  gotten  rid  of;  they  are  only  reduced  in  scale. 
And  the  more  complex  the  type  of  entity  the  greater  and  more 
significant  the  individual  differences. 

The  qualitatively  variegated  wealth  of  empirical  reality  must 
have  its  grounds  in  a  cosmos  of  diversified  centers  of  activity. 
The  determinate  but  ever  varying  complexes  of  primary,  second- 
ary, and  tertiary  qualities  are  the  joint  products  of  the  interaction 
of  percipient  centers  with  other  percipient  and  with  nonpercipient 
centers.  There  can  be  no  single  type  of  causation,  to  which  all 
others  are  reducible.  AVhenever  similar  phenomena,  recognized 
through  memory  and  record  as  constituting,  together  with  present 
events,  a  group  of  objects  that  are  constituted  into  a  group  because 
of  the  repetition  of  qualitative  and  quantitative  similarities  occur, 
we  have  a  single  type  of  causation.  For  no  actual  causal  relation 
has  any  further  empirical  ground  than  the  recognized  repetition 
of  similars.  In  many  cases  of  causation  the  repetition  is  confined 
to  the  recognition  of  more  or  less  of  degree  or  intensity  in  quali- 
tative similars.  In  the  field  of  physical  and  chemical  causation 
alone,  approximate  quantitative  equivalences  in  the  repetition  of 
similars  are  determined.  I  say  "approximate"  equivalence;  for, 
even  in  the  case  of  the  repetition  of  the  physical  measurements 
or  chemical  equations,  we  cannot  assert  absolute  identity.  Every 
case  may  have  something  unique  about  it.  The  most  we  can  say 
is  that,  within  certain  limits,  we  have  found  for  the  repetition  of 
certain  qualitatively  similar  sequences  a  mathematical  correlation. 
The  more  abstract,  that  is,  the  more  remote  from  concrete  experi- 
ence and  consequently  the  qualitatively  poorer  the  elements  and 
relations  are,  with  which  we  deal  in  formulating  causal  relations, 
the  more  susceptible  these  relations  are  of  mathematical  statement. 
The  relations  of  electrons  and  ether,  conceptual  objects  endowed 
only  with  abstract  spatial  and  dynamical  properties,  lend  them- 
selves readily  to  abstruse  mathematical  treatment.  They  have 
been  made  by  the  mind  for  just  that  purpose.  Molecular  elements 
in  chemistry,  being  only  one  step  removed  from  empirical  com- 
binations with  perceptible  properties,  have  to  be  endowed  with 
valencies,  weights,  etc. 


CHANGE  AND   CAUSALITY  195 

But  chemical  equations  are  quite  exact,  since  the  molecules 
have  been  made  for  that  purpose.  When  we  take  into  account,  in 
physiological  and  psychophysical  causation,  the  actually  observable 
results  of  the  interaction  of  stimulus  and  sentient  organism,  we 
are  dealing  with  qualities  more  nearly  in  their  concrete  actuality, 
and  we  do  not  get  beyond  the  approximate  quantitative  relations 
embodied  in  such  principles  as  the  laws  of  reflex  action,  the 
Weber-Fechner  law,  etc.  In  social  and  historical  causation,  where 
we  have  to  do  with  the  interaction  of  wholly  concrete  individuals 
and  groups  of  individuals,  we  are  at  the  farthest  remove  from 
the  mathematical  equations  of  abstract  mechanics.  The  so-called 
exact  laws  of  nature  are  exact  in  the  degree  in  which  they  deal 
with  abstract  constructions  in  which  the  teeming  qualitative  com- 
plexity of  the  empirical  order  has  been  artificially  simplified. 
These  laws  are,  with  reference  to  actual  reality,  simply  more  or 
less  approximate  statistical  averages  of  repetitions  of  similarities 
in  the  behaviors  of  individua.  In  their  formulation  the  qualita- 
tive differences  of  the  individua  are  treated  as  negligible  for  the 
particular  purpose  in  hand;  just  as  in  determining  the  expecta- 
tion of  life  at  various  ages,  the  mortality  tables  used  by  insur- 
ance companies  are  sufficiently  trustworthy  practical  guides  in 
fixing  policy  rates,  provided  the  statistics  on  which  they  are  based 
are  sufficiently  wide  in  range  for  the  multitudinous  small  varia- 
tions in  the  conditions  of  health,  disease,  and  death  to  cancel  one 
another.2 

The  chief  value  of  causal  correlations  in  any  field  lies  in  the 
establishment  of  an  expectation  of  repetition,  of  a  similarity  of 
sequence  in  events,  based  on  the  recognition  of  the  repetition  of 
similar  sequences  of  events  in  the  past.  In  other  words,  it  con- 
sists in  finding  identical  orders  of  serial  dependences  among  dis- 
tinct events.  Since  every  event  is  distinct  from  every  other,  every 
event  must  be  the  expression  of  an  interaction  between  at  least 
two  distinct  entities.  In  linking  together  by  the  causal  relation 
similar  groups  of  events  we  are  not  explaining  away  the  unique 
differences  which  give  to  events  their  distinctness.  We  are  not 
accounting  for  the  determinate  diversities  of  the  individua,  the 
interrelations  of  which  are  the  grounds  of  the  events.     A  cause, 

'  Cf.  Josiah  Royce :  The  World  and  the  Individual,  Vol.  IT,  Lectures 
iv  and  v;  and  his  "The  Mechanical,  The  Historical,  and  The  Statistical,"  in 
Science,  N.  S.,  Vol.  39,  pp.  551  ff. 


196  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

or  better,  a  condition,  of  a  change  in  one  being,  does  not  enter  into 
that  being  and  make  it  over  into  a  copy  of  the  being  which  causes 
the  change.  A  cause  is  never  more  than  an  incitement  or  stimulus, 
by  which  one  individual  entity  or  group  of  entities  occasions  or 
stirs  up  reaction  in  another  entity  or  group  of  entities. 

Reality  must  consist  of  a  plurality  of  interactive  and  inter- 
patient  centers.  The  orderly  characters  of  the  changes  that  take 
place  in  the  history  of  the  world  means  that  these  centers  consti- 
tute a  system  of  entities  in  reciprocal  relationships.  These  re- 
lationships are  the  laws  of  the  events  of  the  world's  history,  but 
the  laws  do  not  fully  express  the  complex  individuality  of  the 
world  whole,  which  is  the  organic,  or  rather  superorganic  system, 
of  relations  holding  among  the  indefinite  diversity  of  its  indi- 
vidual elements.  The  pluralist  regards  the  cosmical  unity  as 
consisting  simply  in  the  mutual  relations  of  its  individual  mem- 
bers— interactive  and  interpatient.  For  him  mutuality  of  stimu- 
lation and  response  is  the  ultimate  fact  of  the  world.  The  singu- 
larist  or  quantitative  monist  holds  that  all  causal  actions  and 
reactions  among  the  finite  elements  of  reality  are  simply  compen- 
satory adjustments  among  the  parts  of  the  one  absolute  or  all- 
inclusive  being.  For  him  all  change  consists  of  internal  rear- 
rangements in  the  one  reality,  and  he  finds  the  best  analogies  for 
the  unity  of  the  one  reality  in  the  relations  of  the  aspects  of  mind 
to  one  another.  The  pluralist,  on  the  other  hand,  finds  the  best 
analogies  for  a  conception  of  the  world  whole  in  the  relations  of 
members  of  a  society  to  one  another.  The  theist  is  a  pluralist 
with  reference  to  the  relationships  between  the  finite  members 
of  the  world,  but  he  holds  that  these  relationships  must  have  their 
original  and  conserving  ground  in  a  transcendent  principle  of 
order.  In  later  chapters  I  shall  discuss  these  standpoints.?  It 
will  suffice  here  to  point  out  the  differences  that  result  from  the 
respective  emphasis  laid  on  different  aspects  of  the  problem. 
Pluralists,  such  as  Berkeley,  Leibniz,  McTaggart,  agree  that  the 
world  is  a  cosmos  or  unitary  order.  Singularists,  such  as  Spinoza 
and  Bradley,  hold  that  the  finite  elements  are  genuine  constit- 
uents of  the  absolute,  but  in  the  absolute  are  absorbed  to  such 
a  degree  that  they  appear  to  lose  their  distinct  individualities. 
Theists  try  to  preserve  the  distinct  individuality  of  finite  entities 


*  Chaps.  35  to  38. 


CHANGE  AND   CAUSALITY  197 

and,  at  the  same  time  postulate  a  ground  of  the  order  of  the 
world  which,  as  existing  in  itself  and  for  itself,  transcends  the 
world.  Descartes,  Berkeley,  and  Leibniz  were  theists;  perhaps 
Hegel  was.  Representatives  of  philosophical  theism  to-day  are 
James  Ward,  W.  E.  Sorley,  A.  Seth  Pringle-Pattison,  H.  Rash- 
dall,  and  G.  H.  Howison.  Important  shades  of  difference  will  be 
found  among  representatives  of  the  various  views,  but  I  have 
not  space  to  deal  here  with  their  differences. 

(2)  What  is  the  meaning  of  the  principle  of  the  uniformity 
of  nature  ?  It  is,  I  take  it,  the  postulate  that  the  same  causes 
or  conditions  will  uniformly  give  rise  to  the  same  effects.  This 
postulate  does  not  imply  that  precisely  the  same  causes  and  the 
same  effects  ever  recur.  It  is  a  purely  hypothetical  postulate  of 
reason,  namely — "if  absolutely  the  same  causes  should  recur,  ab- 
solutely the  same  effects  must  follow."  As  we  have  seen,  the 
"laws"  of  the  recurrence  of  similar  conditions,  resulting  in  the 
recurrence  of  similar  effects,  are  statistical  approximations  to 
the  actual  complexity  and  variation  of  the  world  of  events. 
The  so-called  plurality  of  causes  in  practice  means  that  what 
is  for  statistical  purposes  the  same  kind  of  event,  for  ex- 
ample death  by  natural  causes,  follows  from  a  variety  of  events: 
accidents,  old  age,  disease,  overwork,  etc. ;  but,  from  the  stand- 
point of  personal  relations  and  perhaps  physiologically,  no  two 
cases  of  death  are  ever  absolutely  the  same  so  that  the  one  could 
be  substituted  for  the  other  indefinitely.  The  supreme  tragedy 
of  our  social  maladjustments  is  that  the  individual  is  so  often 
treated  merely  as  what  he  is  not,  namely,  as  a  mere  figure  in 
statistics.  Possibly  there  is  no  absolute  repetition  in  the  physical 
course  of  nature;  perhaps  no  two  electrons  are  absolutely  alike 
in  their  situations  and  behaviors.  Indeed,  what  are  singled  out 
as  causal  relations  are  simply  the  most  obvious  and  practically 
important  repetitions  of  similarities  in  events.  Our  causal  de- 
scriptions are  artificial  simplifications  of  the  indefinite  variety 
of  events.  Every  actual  causal  explanation  is  relative;  not  only 
to  our  meager  knowledge  of  the  actual  wealth  of  detail,  but  as 
well  to  the  particular  purpose  of  .our  inquiry.  For  example,  one 
man  is  shot  by  another.  From  a  legal  point  of  view,  the  cause 
was  the  shooter's  intent  to  kill.  From  the  psychological  and  moral 
point  of  view,  it  was  the  shooter's  jealousy  of  the  other's  attentions 
to  his  wife.     From  the  physiological  point  of  view,  it  was  the 


198  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

impact  of  the  bullet  which  produced  hemorrhage.  From  the 
physicist's  point  of  view,  it  was  a  problem  in  mechanics.  From  a 
cosmical  point  of  view,  the  true  cause  was  the  whole  state  of  the 
universe  immediately  antecedent  to  the  shooting.  But  the  latter 
explanation  is  no  explanation,  inasmuch  as  it  would  be  useless 
for  any  specific  purpose,  legal,  moral,  or  medical. 

Empirical  reality  is  creative.  It  brings  forth  novelties.  This 
is  most  obviously  true  of  the  lives  of  individuals,  the  history  of 
humanity,  the  evolutionary  order  of  life.  It  is  also  true,  if  less 
noticeable,  of  the  course  of  physical  nature.4  If  the  second  law 
of  thermodynamics  be  valid,  then  the  physical  universe  is  actually 
an  irreversible  order  which  is  running  down  hill  in  the  direction 
of  absolute  quiescence  and  death,  unless  some  superphysical  power 
can  reverse  the  gears.  From  the  standpoint  of  our  human  ex- 
perience terrestrial  history  has  been  a  creative  process.  There 
may  be  higher  beings  than  man,  but,  never  having  been  acquainted 
with  any  of  these,  I  am  unable  to  discuss  their  characteristics. 
It  is  impossible  for  us  to  be  other  than  anthropomorphic  in  our 
standpoints.  At  most,  we  can  only  strive  for  the  most  purified 
and  rational  form  of  anthropomorphism.  From  this  standpoint, 
the  approximate  goal  of  terrestrial  evolution  and  human  history 
is  a  process  of  creation  of  individuality  and  realization  of  per- 
gonal values.  The  creation  or  achievement  and  conservation  of 
values  in  human  life  has  gone  forward  spasmodically  and  irregu- 
larity, not  subject  to  any  definite  law  that  we  can  figure  out.  All 
philosophies  of  history  that  have  attempted  to  formulate  genetic 
theories  of  progress  have  failed;  from  St.  Augustine  to  Herbert 
Spencer. 

But  certainly  novelties  are  produced  for  good  and  ill;  es- 
pecially in  the  psychical  and  social  orders  the  principle  of  creative 
synthesis  or  creative  resultants,  as  Wundt  calls  it,  holds  good. 
Causes  are  factors  combined  to  produce  results  which  are  not  the 
arithmetical  sum  of  the  qualities  of  the  causes  but  a  new  reality. 
Procreation  is  a  familiar  example  of  this.  All  creative  mental 
work  is  an  example.  In  brief,  we  may  say  that  the  origin 
and  development  of  personalities  is  the  most  striking  example 
of  the  creative  process  of  the  empirical  world.     This  is  taken 


4  If  the  chemical  elements  have  arisen  through  intra-atomic  changes,  of 
which  we  get  glimpses  in  radio-active  transformations;  the  inorganic  order 
is  a  historical,  and  perhaps  a  creative,  order. 


CHANGE  AND  CAUSALITY  199 

by  some  to  imply  contingency.  If  by  contingency  be  meant 
only  that  we  cannot  predict  the  effect  by  adding  together 
the  causes,  there  is  a  contingency  in  the  sense  of  the  creation  of 
new  qualities.  But,  if  by  contingency  be  meant  that  there  is  ab- 
solute chance  operating  in  the  world,  in  other  words  that  literally 
the  same  conditions  might  eventuate  in  quite  different  results, 
that  some  things  happen  without  there  being  any  sufficient  ground 
why  they  rather  than  their  opposites  should  have  happened,  I  am 
unable  to  find  any  meaning  in  such  a  statement.  If  the  assump- 
tion be  true,  our  world  is  a  bedlam,  and  nothing  is  certainly  true, 
not  even  that  the  world  is  a  bedlam.  The  only  thing  for  which 
no  ground  can  be  conceived  is  the  ultimate  ground  or  grounds  of 
reality.  But  this  is  not  contingent;  it  is  the  ultimate  fact.  The 
question  why  being  was  made,  if  by  being  we  mean  the  ultimate 
reality,  is  nonsense. 

(3)  The  problem  of  continuity  in  causal  processes  has  already 
been  raised  in  our  previous  discussion.  A  causal  series  is  ob- 
viously a  series  of  discrete  events.  Each  event  in  a  chain,  in 
which  each  is  in  turn  effect  and  cause,  is  distinct  and  occupies  a 
period  of  duration  which  is  wholly  or  in  part  before  or  after  an- 
other event.  On  the  other  hand,  it  seems  irrational  to  draw  any 
sharp  line  of  temporal  division  between  causes  and  effects.  When 
the  causal  conditions  of  any  event  are  complete,  is  not  the  event 
already  there  ?  Empty  time  can  make  no  difference,  but  if  change 
be  absolutely  continuous  we  seem  to  have  no  grounds  for  distin- 
guishing events  in  a  causal  series;  indeed,  no  grounds  for  recog- 
nizing a  temporal  succession  at  all.  On  the  other  hand,  if  change 
be  not  continuous,  the  causal  process  must  consist  of  a  series  of 
jumps  from  one  to  another  event,  between  which  jumps  there  are 
no  smooth  transitions  and  therefore  the  intellectual  demand  for 
continuity  is  violated. 

It  is  argued  that,  since  the  complete  presence  of  the  causal 
conditions  of  an  event  is  identical  with  the  effect,  and  therefore 
the  time  element  must  be  eliminated  when  the  problem  of  causal 
continuity  is  thoroughly  thought  out,  the  causal  relation,  to  be 
thoroughly  intelligible  and  consistent,  must  be  the  phenomenal 
expression  of  a  timeless  identity  of  logical  ground  and  consequent. 
Therefore,  the  notion  of  a  discrete  causal  series  must  be  replaced 
by  that  of  a  timeless  unitary  ground.  But  this  argument  seeks  to 
solve  the  problem  of  change  by  abolishing  it,  or  rather  by  ignoring 


200  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

it.  Either  change  is  an  illusion  or  it  is  not.  If  change  be  an  illu- 
sion, either  the  illusion  must  be  accounted  for  and  then  the  original 
problem  is  back  on  our  hands  in  disguised  shape  or  it  is  unaccount- 
able ;  and  then  we  have  committed  intellectual  suicide  at  the  very 
outset.  If  it  be  said  that  change  is  not  illusory,  but  is  the  phenom- 
enal expression  of  a  timeless  ground,  we  are  simply  cheated  with 
words.  The  problem  remains  as  to  how  a  timeless  ground  would 
express  itself  in  change. 

The  dialectical  arguments  against  the  reality  of  discrete 
change,  drawn  from  the  infinite  divisibility  of  a  continuously  pro- 
jected line,  really  assume  that  a  temporal  series  of  events  is  made 
up  of  a  naturally  endless  number  of  timeless  instants;  in  other 
words  these  arguments  really  assume  the  empirical  reality  of 
infinitesimals,  which  is  self-contradictory.  Empirical  causal 
change  is  not  adequately  represented  by  an  absolutely  continuous 
line,  thought  to  be  produced  indefinitely  and  therefore  indefinitely 
divisible.  To  substitute  for  empirical  change  the  idea  of  an  indef- 
inite succession  of  timeless  instants  is  at  once  to  assume  and  deny 
real  succession. 

In  the  empirical  world  there  is  incessant  change.  What  we 
happen  to  single  out  as  causes  and  effects,  from  the  rich  complex 
of  empirical  process,  are  the  critically  important  events  from  the 
standpoint  of  our  specific  purposes.  But  the  only  sense  in  which 
causation  and  change  are  continuous  is  that  there  is  no  absolute 
cessation  or  beginning  in  the  empirical  order ;  and,  therefore,  this 
order  consists  of  the  continuous  interaction  or  interdependence  of 
the  elements  which  make  up  the  world.  There  are  critical  points 
in  change;  such  as,  for  example,  the  boiling  point  of  water,  the 
freezing  point,  the  moment  of  the  fertilization  of  an  ovum,  the 
moment  of  birth,  the  moment  of  voluntary  decisions,  the  moment 
of  the  declaration  of  war.  Critical  points  are  the  results  of  the 
gradual  accumulation  of  small  changes,  but  their  actual  fruition 
constitute  creative  syntheses  or  novelties?  Causation  does  not  pro- 
ceed upon  a  dead  level.  Causal  continuity  involves  discreteness, 
creativeness.  The  discrete  occurrences  which  we  call  causes,  or 
effects,  according  to  our  point  of  view,  are  the  critical  and  creative 


5  The  discussion  of  the  places  of  minute  variations  or  saltations  (muta- 
tions) in  the  genesis  of  biological  species  is  significant  in  this  connection. 
But,  logically,  the  problem  is  not  changed  by  the  degree  of  the  variation.  A 
novelty  does  not  cease  to  be  such  by  being  small. 


CHANGE  AND   CAUSALITY  201 

expressions  of  the  qualitative  complexity  of  interaction  and  result 
in  a  world  which  is  constituted  by  the  interplay  of  a  multitude  of 
dynamic  individua. 

(4)  The  problem  of  totality.  How  is  causation  to  be  con- 
ceived from  the  point  of  view  of  the  cosmos — of  things  as  a  whole  ? 
It  is  argued  that  the  categories  of  causation  and  change  cannot  be 
ultimate  points  of  view,  since,  if  we  take  them  as  such,  we  become 
involved  in  the  so-called  endless  regress  of  terms  and  relations, 
and  thus  cannot  reach  the  conception  of  totality.  A  temporal 
series  or  order  of  change  is  without  first  or  last  term,  without  be- 
ginning or  end.  In  our  scientific  quest  for  causal  explanation 
we  may  stop  short  with  the  cosmical  star  dust  or  electrons  and 
the  laws  of  physical  motion,  simply  because  we  cannot  coherently 
imagine  conditions  precedent  to  these  and  from  which  these 
emerge.  Similarly  we  are  unable  to  envisage  concretely  a  remote 
future ;  logically  a  first  cause  or  a  last  effect  is  an  absurdity.  A 
first  cause  would  be  a  cause  for  whose  existence  and  activity  no 
ground  could  be  given,  an  impassable  limit  to  our  understanding, 
a  nontemporal  cause;  in  other  words  a  cause  that  is  not  a  cause 
in  the  scientific  sense;  it  would  be  a  temporal  event  with  which 
time  began,  but  it  is  nonsense  to  talk  of  a  beginning  before  which 
there  was  nothing.  A  beginning  is  a  temporal  event  relative  to 
antecedent  temporal  events.  Equally  nonsensical  is  it  to  talk  of  a 
last  cause  or  final  end-state.  In  other  words,  an  event  which  means 
the  end  of  events  and  of  time.  Therefore,  it  is  argued,  the  totality 
of  causal  changes  can  only  be  thought  of  as  a  nontemporal  ground. 
The  bearing  of  the  problem  of  change  and  evolution  on  the  con- 
ception of  ultimate  reality  cannot  be  adequately  discussed  until 
we  have  developed  more  fully  our  conception  of  ultimate  reality 
and  is  therefore  reserved  for  later  chapters.6  I  may  say  here, 
however,  that  the  only  notion  of  a  totality  that  seems  to  me  tenable 
is  that  of  a  permanent  ground  of  order  which  prevades  and  sus- 
tains the  whole  process  of  change.  In  other  words,  the  unity  of 
the  world  can  be  nothing  more  than  the  systematical  continuity  of 
the  whole  dynamical  system  of  interrelated  elements.  The  inter- 
activities or  reciprocal  influences  of  the  world's  elements  must  be 
the  direct  expression  of  the  world  ground.  The  ground  of  the 
world  whole  may  be  a  continuously  active  principle  of  order,  of 

•  Book  v,  Chaps.  35-37. 


202  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

which  the  actual  course  of  the  world  in  all  its  complex  variety  and 
novelty  is  the  expression. 

Thus  far  we  have  considered  causation  chiefly  in  the  sense  in 
which  it  is  taken  in  natural  science.    In  this  sense  it  is  essentially 
a  retroactive  standpoint,  based  on  the  recognized  repetition  of 
similar  events.     Previsions  and  predictions  of  the  future  depend 
for  their  success  on  the  degree  of  repetition  of  similars — in  short, 
upon  the  degree  of  identity  between  past  and  future.    This,  I  take 
to  be  the  essence  of  mechanical  explanation.     In  so  far  as  the 
career  of  life,  including  man's  historical  career,  is  the  theater  for 
the  repetition  of  similars,  it  is  a  mechanical  career.     This  we  say 
without  thereby  implying  that  the  forces  and  behaviors  of  human 
nature  are  identical  with  those  of  the  physical  universe.    We  may 
say  that  mental  habits  and  routines  and  social  habits  (such  as  blind 
customs  and  traditions)  are  the  mechanisms  of  history.    Possibly 
the  individual  life  and  the  social  order  are  chiefly  mechanical  in 
their  operations.     Certainly  they  are  largely  so;  but  once  in  a 
while  man,  the  individual,  and  men,  the  society,  rebel  against  the 
mechanical  and  mechanizing  processes;  break  through  the  tread- 
mill of  the  past,  to  find  or  create  something  new  which  shall  be 
better,  which  shall  have  unique  meaning  and  worth.    Desire,  long- 
ing, hope,  fear,  discontent,  rebellion,  idealization,  purposive  striv- 
ing, these  human  attitudes  express  various  facets  of  the  prospective 
forward  living  character  of  human  life.    In  seeking  to  build  better 
mansions  for  his  soul  and  to  build  a  better  soul,  man  is  striving 
to  determine  the  present  in  the  light  of  an  imagined  better  future. 
In  other  words,  he  seeks  to  make  mechanism  subservient  to  the 
realization  of  new  values  or  the  more  effective  realization  of 
accepted  values.     The  fulfillment  of  ambition,  of  love,  the  quest 
for  a  better  social  order,  for  the  salvation  of  his  soul  through 
religion  or  art,  are  ways  in  which  mechanism  is  subordinated  to 
purpose  and  value,  means  of  escaping  from  the  thralldom  of  his 
present  by  his  past  through  creativity  guided  by  imaginative  fore- 
shadowings  of  a  better  future.     The  future  is  a  function  of  the 
living  present ;  but,  in  so  far  as  man  successfully  strives  to  break 
through  the  inherited  mechanisms  of  his  past,  the  vision  of  a 
better  future  becomes  the  most  potent  determining  characteristic 
of  the  living  present.     Thus  it  is  a  mistake  to  say  that  in  seeking 
for  the  country  of  the  future  man  is  sacrificing  the  real  present  to 
an  unreal  future.     Of  course  one  may  do  so  by  living  a  life  of 


CHANGE  AND  CAUSALITY  203 

mere  dreaming,  but  the  quest  for  that  better  country  is  really  the 
re-creation  of  the  present  by  the  liberation  of  his  life  from  the 
bondage  of  mechanical  repetition.  The  limits  of  the  validity  of 
the  mechanical  viewpoint  are  to  be  found  in  the  scope  of  life's 
creativeness. 

In  so  far  as  life  is  creative,  creative  imagination  and  pur- 
posiveness  or  teleological  activity  control  the  course  of  change. 
In  the  order  of  nature  and  in  the  order  of  human  life  mechanism 
and  teleology  seem  to  be  in  incessant  conflict.  The  issue  is  not 
the  question  of  all  mechanism  versus  all  teleology,  but  of  the 
subordination  of  mechanism  to  teleology.  Nor  does  teleological 
control  of  change  imply  discontinuous  and  irrational  contingency. 
The  continuity  of  a  well-ordered,  intelligently  directed  human 
career,  in  other  words,  teleological  continuity,  is  a  more  compre- 
hensive and  higher  type  of  continuity  than  that  of  a  mechanical 
repetition.  The  continuity  of  a  living  social  institution,  of  a 
cultural  movement ;  such  as  a  nation,  a  religion,  a  historical  totality 
of  intellectual,  moral,  and  aesthetic  culture,  is  a  still  more  com- 
prehensive and  higher  type  of  continuity  than  that  afforded  by 
any  physical  mechanism.  Is  not  then  a  teleological  whole  the 
highest  type  of  causal  and  temporal  continuity ;  and  must  we  not, 
if  we  are  to  think  the  world  a  living  whole,  conceive  the  world 
ground  as  a  continuing  power  of  organization,  a  teleological  world 
order  in  which  mechanical  repetition  is  subservient  to  the  creative- 
ness of  life  ? 

The  question  we  have  just  raised  involves  a  more  systematic 
consideration  of  the  concepts  of  individuality,  value,  and  purpose. 

APPENDIX 

THE    KNOWLEDGE   OF   ACTIVITY 

Wherever  there  is  change  there  is  causality,  and  wherever  there 
is  causality  there  must  be  some  sort  of  activity.  The  original  source 
of  the  belief  in  activity  resides  in  the  self's  immediate  experience  of 
its  own  activity.  We  feel  desire,  impulse,  tension,  effort.  But  the 
feeling  of  effort  is  not  the  same  as  the  simple  feeling  of  activity.  We 
feel  effort  only  when  our  feeling  of  inner  movement,  of  the  develop- 
ment of  desire  and  purpose,  is  blocked,  thwarted,  or  distracted  by 
competing  interests  or  external  obstacles.  Hence,  to  point  to  incom- 
ing  peripheral   sensations  from   the   muscles   and   inward-pointing 


204  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

sensations  of  headstrain  as  the  sole  sources  for  our  feelings  of  activity 
is  beside  the  mark.  The  feeling  of  activity  is  not  exhausted  by  the 
elimination  of  these  sensations.  It  may  be  objected  that  we  are  not 
to  take  an  unanalyzed  feeling  of  being  alive  and  active  as  a  primitive 
revelation.  No;  but  the  analysis  into  peripheral  and  central  bodily 
processes  leaves  a  remainder — the  immediate  feeling  of  consciously 
developing  movement  directed  towards  an  end.  This  is  particularly 
evident  in  rationally  directed  will-attitudes  in  which  the  higher 
thought  processes  are  involved.  The  whole  feeling  of  a  self,  as  living 
and  developing  in  its  appetitive  and  purposive  life,  is  identical  with 
the  feeling  of  self-activity.  The  feeling  of  activity  is  the  sense  of 
the  inner  development  of  the  conscious  and  purposive  life  itself.  We 
do  not  infer  that  we  are  active  because  we  are  alive.  We  are  con- 
scious of  self-originating  process  and  development  with  direction,  fol- 
lowing hard  upon  desire  and  interest,  or,  it  may  be,  precisely  con- 
temporaneous with  these.  If  cogitans  sum  is  an  immediate  fact  of 
introspective  experience  agens  sum  is  a  more  catholic  statement  of 
the  same  inner  immediacy.  To  experience  one's  life  is  to  experience 
activity,  since  it  is  to  experience  self-directed  change.  To  desire  and 
aim,  and  to  move  toward  the  accomplishment  of  one's  desire  and  aim, 
is  to  experience  the  original  nature  of  activity. 

If  it  be  objected  that,  since  all  ideas  are  passive,  we  can  have  no 
idea  of  activity,  I  reply  that  one  might  as  well  argue  that  an  idea 
of  a  fat  ox  must  be  a  fat  idea.  An  idea  of  a  quality  or  relation  does 
not  have  to  be  the  identical  quality  or  relation  of  which  it  is  a  true 
idea.  If  activity  is  the  immediate  awareness  of  the  self  as  consciously 
alive  one  must  always  have  at  hand  a  nascent  consciousness  of  what 
it  means,  even  though  one  cannot  draw  a  picture  or  diagram  of  it. 

It  may  be  said  that  all  one  can  really  find  when  one  introspects 
are  kinesthetic  sensations  in  muscles  and  sensations  of  headstrain, 
and  therefore  the  supposedly  spiritual  effort  of  attentive  and  con- 
structive thinking  is  the  reflex  of  bodily  processes.  One  can  only 
speak  for  oneself  in  regard  to  the  findings  of  introspection.  I  do 
not  find  sensations  of  tension  and  strain  in  the  head,  pointing  inward 
and  backward,  to  be  all  that  there  is  when  I  retrospectively  consider 
my  own  processes  of  intellection  and  conation.  There  are  times, 
when  all  distracting  stimuli  being  absent  and  all  consciousness  of 
bodily  processes  dampened,  I  have  a  feeling  of  unimpeded  thought 
activity,  of  the  flow  and  constructive  rearrangement  of  images  and 
concepts  devoid  of  any  sensory  elements  beyond  the  vague  visual 
motor  and  auditory  images  of  the  words  which  symbolize  the  concepts 
involved.  In  other  words  when,  at  specially  favorable  times,  thought 
moves  towards  its  goal  without  any  accompanying  sensations  of  ob- 


CHANGE  AND  CAUSALITY  205 

struction,  conflict  or  tension,  there  is  a  feeling  of  unclouded  intel- 
lectual activity. 

The  immediate  sense  of  self-activity  is  the  root  of  our  notion  of 
immanent  activity  in  things.  We  project  activity  into  other  beings 
wherever  we  observe  motion  and  change.  When  the  self,  in  its  ac- 
tivities, experiences  obstruction,  strain,  effort,  in  carrying  out  its 
aims,  its  immanent  activity  becomes  transeunt  activity.  Transeunt 
activity  is  the  meeting  of  two  or  more  immanent  activities,  the  rela- 
tion of  active  centers  which  obstruct  or  reinforce  one  another's 
activities. 

This  is  not  the  place  to  discuss  the  question  whether  spiritual 
or  psychical  activity  may  not  be  the  ghostly  mirage  of  the  activities 
of  nerve-cells  or  atoms,  that  is,  an  illusory  epiphenomenon.  This 
raises  the  whole  question  of  mechanism  and  teleology  in  metaphysics. 
I  may  remark,  however,  that  until  we  are  offered  convincing  evidence 
that  the  prima  facie  experience  of  personal  activity  is  a  deception 
we  are  entitled  to  accept  it  as  a  datum.  Such  evidence  has  not  yet 
been  forthcoming.7 


7  On  self -activity  see  especially  James  Ward,  article  ' '  Psychology ' ' ; 
Encyclopedia  Britannica,  11th  ed.,  Vol.  XXII;  William  James,  A  Pluralistic 
Universe,  Appendix  B,  "The  Experience  of  Activity";  Ibid.,  Psychology, 
Vol.  I,  Chap.  11,  "Attention,"  especially  pp.  447-454;  and  Vol.  II,  Chap. 
26,  "Will."  For  criticism  of  activity  see  Bradley,  Appearance  and  Beality, 
passim. 


CHAPTEK  XVII 

INDIVIDUALITY,  VALUE,  AND  PURPOSE 

In  Book  IV  we  shall  consider  in  extenso  the  nature  of  the 
human  individual  and  the  place  of  value  and  purpose  in  human 
individuality,  in  society,  and  in  relation  to  the  cosmic  order. 
Here  I  shall  give  only  general  definitions  of  these  categories  and 
a  summary  account  of  their  interrelationships. 

An  individual  is  a  concrete  existent  whose  determinate  nature 
is  a  complex  pervaded  and  controlled  by  an  internal  and  self- 
possessing  principle.  In  so  far  as  a  living  organism  is  a  unitary 
whole  whose  life  activities  are  controlled  by  a  single  principle,  it  is 
an  individual.  A  cell  or  even  an  atom  may  be  considered  as  a 
sub-individual  or  lowest  type  of  individuum.  A  human  self  or 
mind-body,  being  a  unity  that  feels,  perceives,  thinks,  and  acts  as 
a  single  self-possessing,  self-maintaining,  self-developing  whole, 
is  the  highest  type  of  individual  in  the  empirical  order.  The  unity 
of  the  self  is  primarily  a  unity  of  feeling  and  volition,  secondarily 
a  unity  of  cognition.  I  am  not  ready  to  admit  with  Royce  that  a 
self  is  always  constituted  by  a  single  plan  of  action  in  the  sense  of 
a  unity  of  conscious  purpose.  It  is  difficult  to  find  and  keep  to  a 
single  integrated  plan  of  conscious  action  in  life.  I  know  that  I 
am  a  unity  of  feeling  in  the  sense  that  all  my  feelings  are  mine. 
I  know  too  that  all  my  thoughts  are  my  thoughts.  I  know,  like- 
wise, that  I  have  never  been  quite  able  to  subordinate  all  my 
activities  into  a  single  plan;  that,  with  reference  to  action,  I  am 
much  at  the  mercy  of  circumstances.  It  seems  to  me  that  to  say 
that  a  self  is  constituted  by  a  single  plan  of  action  would  be  to 
deny  that  many  selves  are  selves. 

However  socialized,  as  members  of  the  universe,  my  thoughts, 
interests,  and  aims  may  become,  they  are  mine.  Social  ideals  and 
principles,  however  impersonal,  and  universal  interests  and  aims, 
have  no  existence  or  meaning,  except  as  issuing  from  and  referring 
back  to  the  felt  unity  of  the  individual  self.    I  cannot  admit  the 

206 


INDIVIDUALITY,   VALUE,  AND  PURPOSE  207 

inference  that  Bradley,  Bosanquet,  and  others  of  the  school  of 
objective  idealists  make  that,  as  human  individuals  develop  in 
rationality,  sociality,  and  value,  they  transcend  their  individuali- 
ties or  personalities.  Bosanquet  conceives  feeling  as  being  just  the 
difference  that  a  universal  content  of  thought  and  purpose  makes 
to  us  as  individuals.  Like  Hegel,  he  rather  depreciates  feeling, 
which  is  the  psychical  root  of  personality.  He  says  that  where 
we  are  strong  we  come  together;  in  social  work,  art,  religion,  and 
science.  True,  but  it  is  we,  as  distinct  and  poignant  individualities, 
that  come  together ;  and  our  strength,  when  we  do  come  together,  is 
the  combined  strength  of  unique  persons,  of  distinct  and  separate 
centers  of  feeling,  thought,  and  action.  The  more  human  persons 
learn  to  think,  to  feel,  to  act,  together  for  social  and  universal 
ends,  the  more  individually  distinctive  and  unique  do  they  become. 
It  is  the  unorganized,  inchoate,  undeveloped  self  that  is  easily 
submerged  in  the  mob  consciousness.  It  is  the  unthinking  or 
defective  mind  that  is  submerged  in  the  crowd  mind.  The  mob  is 
made  up  of  selves  with  little  selfhood.  The  crowd  mind  is  made 
up  of  minds  who  either  have  little  mentality  or  whose  mentalities 
are  in  a  state  of  suspended  animation.  The  higher,,  the  better 
organized  and  more  rational  the  self,  the  more  distinctive  and 
strong  the  personality.  The  best  organized,  the  most  compre- 
hensive, the  richest,  the  most  coherent  and  dynamic  type  of  being 
that  we  can  think  is  a  society  of  free  self-determining  personalities. 
Therefore,  the  highest  and  most  adequate  criterion  of  value  is  to 
be  found  in  the  conception  of  a  society  of  rational  individuals  or 
persons.  It  is  the  highest  criterion  of  value,  since  one  cannot 
conceive  or  imagine  anything  richer  in  content  and  meaning  than 
a  society  of  integrated  selves ;  each  possessing  wealth  and  harmony 
of  feeling  and  rational  insight ;  each  having  the  power  of  sustained 
action  in  rational  cooperation  with  all  the  others,  to  further 
achievement  of  those  ends  which  promote  the  spiritual  enrichment 
and  harmonious  intercourse  of  its  members  one  with  another;  a 
society  of  individuals  enjoying  and  loving  nature,  and  mutually 
free  intercourse,  feeling  beauty  and  seeing  meaning  in  their 
inward  lives  as  well  as  in  their  outward  relations,  and  successful 
in  making  themselves  at  home  in  their  physical  environments. 

Personality  or  rational  individuality  is  the  most  comprehensive 
criterion  of  value;  since  truth  is  simply  the  harmonious  corre- 
spondence of  the  perceptive  and  rational  powers  of  the  self  with 


208  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

the  order  of  reality;  since  beauty  is  the  harmonious  warmth  of 
feeling  which  free  contemplation  of  other  lives  yields  to  a  self; 
since  goodness  is  the  harmonious  integration  of  the  affective  and 
active  tendencies  of  a  self  within  itself,  with  other  selves,  and  with 
the  universe.  Truth,  beauty,  and  goodness  are  generic  expressions 
for  the  chief  aspects  of  the  harmonious  integration,  social  integra- 
tion, and  integration  with  the  universe,  on  the  part  of  human 
persons. 

The  ultimate  ground  of  values  or  teleological  order  can  be 
nothing  other  than  the  cosmic  principle  which  makes  possible  the 
achievement  and  conservation  of  personal  values.  Every  sort  of 
order,  whether  physical,  vital  or  human,  is  a  system  of  individuals 
or  quasi-individuals.  A  physical  order  is  a  system  of  dynamic 
centers  of  physical  qualities  or  modes  of  behavior ;  a  vital  order  is 
a  system  of  organic  individuals  in  dynamic  relations  to  one  another 
and  to  their  physical  conditions  of  existence;  a  human  or  social 
order  is  a  system  of  dynamic  relations  between  human  selves.  The 
orders  that  exist  in  nature  or  in  human  society  increase  in  sig- 
nificance and  value  just  in  proportion  as  their  constituent  members 
increase  in  wealth  of  content  and  in  harmony.  Social  and  rational 
individuality  or  personality  is  the  highest  and  most  comprehensive 
type  of  value  that  we  know.  Therefore  the  supreme  ground  of 
values  must  be  a  superpersonal  order. 

But  purposiveness  seems  to  be  a  mark  of  imperfection,  to  imply 
always  an  unrealized  end,  an  ideal  which  is  not  yet  fact  or  reality. 
And  the  realization  of  the  end  involves  the  use  of  means  or  mechan- 
isms, which  are  given  independently  of  the  end  and  which  may 
not  serve  as  ready  instruments  for  the  realization  of  the  end.  If 
means  and  end  were  wholly  harmonious  there  would  be  no  dis- 
tinction between  them ;  they  would  be  timelessly  identical.  There 
would  be  then  no  striving  and  the  idea  of  purpose  would  be  an 
unmeaning  superfluity.  Thus,  if  the  real  universe  be  perfect,  it 
cannot  be  a  purposive  or  teleological  whole.  All  values  are 
eternally  realized.  On  the  other  hand,  if  purposive  striving  have 
any  real  significance,  the  universe  is  not  perfect.  If  the  universe 
be  not  perfect,  the  values  which  purposive  activity  aims  at  may  be 
perpetually  doomed  to  defeat,  and  even  to  extinction.  In  short, 
when  we  attempt  to  conceive  reality  as  a  teleological  or  significant 
whole,  we  find  ourselves  confronted  by  a  dilemma — either  the 
whole  is  now  as  always  perfect,  and  purposive  activity  is  a  vain 


INDIVIDUALITY,   VALUE,  AND   PURPOSE  209 

shadow  in  which  men  walk;  or  purposive  activity  really  achieves 
new  values  and  then  the  nature  of  the  whole  is  imperfect  and  the 
issues  of  the  purposive  activity  which  it  contains  are  uncertain. 
Thus  we  are  brought  to  the  problem  of  the  place  of  significant 
history  or  evolution  in  ultimate  reality — a  problem  to  which  we 
shall  devote  a  later  chapter.  At  this  point  I  wish  to  show  simply 
that  the  notion  of  teleology  or  purposiveness  is  subordinate  to  the 
notions  of  value  and  personality.1 

I  shall  take  as  my  guiding  conception  the  notion  that  value 
is  always  a  quality  of  spiritual  selfhood  or  personality,  regarded 
as  essentially  involving  membership  in  a  spiritual  community. 
Then  I  think  we  may  see  that  ceaseless  striving  for  unrealized 
ends,  endless  effort  in  short,  is  not  the  highest  mark  of  value  in 
an  individual  or  in  a  communal  life.  In  the  enjoyment  of  beauty 
in  nature  and  in  art  we  do  not  strive,  in  the  contemplative  posses- 
sion of  truth  we  do  not  strive,  for  ulterior  ends.  In  the  life  of 
affection,  of  love  and  friendship,  we  do  not  strive ;  in  short,  in  the 
highest,  most  self-sufficing  and  selfless  activities  and  experiences 
there  is  no  purposive  effort  to  realize  as  yet  unachieved  values. 
Beauty  is  its  own  excuse  for  being.  The  contemplation  of  truth 
and  the  interpersonal  life  of  affection  are  surely,  too,  their  own 
excuses  for  being.  With  respect  to  these  inherently  worthful 
attitudes  and  experiences,  with  respect  to  the  selfless  contemplation 
of  beauty,  and  of  rational  order,  as  with  respect  to  unselfish 
human  affection,  we  can  say  with  Tennyson: 

Our  wills  are  ours,  Oh  Lord; 

Our  wills  are  ours  to  make  them  thine. 

Since  we  are  finite  and  imperfect  beings  living  in  a  world  of 
change,  we  never  wholly  escape  from  striving  and  willing,  from 
setting  up  ends  and  devising  means ;  but,  in  the  possession  of  the 
highest  values,  of  those  values  which  are  our  most  significant  and 
most  real  living,  we  escape  from  the  treadmill  process  of  the 
striving  will.  In  the  fruition  of  value,  and  of  personality  in  and 
through  value,  purposive  conation  ceases.  As  Dr.  Bosanquet 
puts  it :  "If  it  (the  principle  of  teleology  when  applied  to  cosmic 
theory)  is  to  retain  a  meaning,  it  must  abandon  the  whole  analogy 

I I  beg  to  refer  particularly  to  the  very  fine  treatment  of  the  idea  of 
teleology  in  Bosanquet 's:  The  Principle  of  Individuality  and  Value, 
Lecture  iv. 


210  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

of  finite  contrivance  and  selection  and  must  fall  back  on  the  char- 
acteristics of  value  which  is,  apart  from  sequence  in  time  and  from 
elected  purposes,  attached  to  the  nature  of  a  totality  which  is 
Perfection."  2  "In  extending  the  idea  of  teleology  to  the  universe 
as  a  whole  we  are  turning  from  the  question  whether  this  fact  or 
that  has  the  appearance  of  being  contrived  for  a  purpose,  to  the 
question  whether  the  totality — contrivance  or  no  contrivance,  and 
without  any  suggestion  of  dividing  it  into  part  which  is  means 
and  part  which  is  the  end — can  be  apprehended  or  conceived  as 
satisfactory,  that  is,  as  a  supreme  value."  3  "And  we  see  again 
that  the  true  'end'  or  value  does  not  lie  in  this  special  relation  to 
a  terminus  or  a  finite  purpose,  but  in  a  character  of  perfection, 
which  may  in  finite  experience  be  relatively  present  throughout 
a  process,  or  as  a  persistent  result  of  it,  or  at  the  beginning  of  it, 
or  at  the  middle."  4  "The  great  enemy  of  all  sane  idealism  is  the 
notion  that  the  ideal  belongs  to  the  future.  The  ideal  is  what 
we  can  see  in  the  light  of  the  whole,  and  the  way  in  which  it  shapes 
the  future  for  us  is  only  an  incident — and  never  the  most  impor- 
tant incident — of  our  reading  of  past,  present,  future  in  their 
unity."  5  "Things  are  not  teleological  because  they  are  purposed, 
but  are  purposed  because  they  are  teleological."  6  "We  can  freely 
suppose  the  world  plan  to  be  immanent  in  the  whole,  including 
finite  mind  and  also  mechanical  nature."  7  "The  foundations  of 
'teleology' — really  individuality — in  the  universe  are  far  too 
deeply  laid  to  be  explained  by,  but,  still  more,  to  be  restricted  to, 
the  intervention  of  finite  consciousness.  Everything  goes  to  show 
that  such  consciousness  should  not  be  regarded  as  the  source  of 
teleology,  but  as  itself  a  manifestation,  falling  within  wider  mani- 
festations, of  the  immanent  individuality  of  the  real.  It  is  not 
teleological,  for  the  reason  that  as  a  finite  subject  of  desire  and 
volition  it  is  'purposive.'  It  is  what  we  call  purposive  because 
reality  is  individual  and  a  whole,  and  manifests  this  character 
partly  in  the  shortsighted  and  eclectic  aims  of  finite  intelligence, 
partly  in  appearances  of  a  far  greater  range  and  scope.  The  large 
scale  patterns  of  history  and  civilization  are  not  to  be  found  as 


2  Ibid.,  p.  126. 
*Ibid.,  p.  127. 
4  Ibid.,  p.  131. 
*lbid.,  p.  136. 
'Ibid.,  p.  137 
1  Ibid.,  p.  146. 


INDIVIDUALITY,  VALUE,  AND  PURPOSE  211 

purposes  within  any  single  finite  consciousness;  the  definite  con- 
tinuity and  correlation  of  particular  intelligent  activities,  on  which 
the  teleological  character  of  human  life  as  a  whole  depends — the 
'ways  of  Providence' — are  a  fact  on  the  whole  of  the  same  order 
as  the  development  of  the  solar  system  or  the  appearance  of  life 
upon  the  surface  of  the  earth.     It  is  impossible  to  attribute  to 
finite  consciousnesses,  as  agents,  the  identity  at  work  within  finite 
consciousness  as  a  whole.     This  identity  is  exhibited  in  the  devel- 
opment which  springs  from  the  linked  action  of  separate  and 
successive    finite    consciousnesses   in    view    of   the    environment. 
Every  step  of  this  development,  though  in  itself  intelligent  and 
teleological,  is  in  relation  to  the  whole  unconscious ;  and  the  result 
is  still  a  'nature'  though  a  second  and  higher  nature."  8     "And 
with  the  mention  of  history  and  the  time  and  place  of  a  man's 
birth  we  come  to  Teleology  above  finite  consciousness.    In  history, 
or  in  what  is  greater  than  history,  the  linked  development  of  art 
or  ideas  and  religion,  the  principle  of  a  teleology  beyond,  though 
exhibited  in  finite  consciousness,  is  clear  and  unambiguous.     It  is 
not  finite   consciousness  that   has   planned  the  great   phases  of 
civilization,  which  are  achieved  by  the  linking  of  finite  minds  on 
the  essential  basis  of  the  geological  structure  of  the  globe.     Each 
separate  mind  reaches  but  a  very  little  way,  and  relatively  to  the 
whole  of  a  movement  must  count  as  unconscious.     You  may  say 
there  is  intelligence  in  every  step  of  the  connection ;  but  you  cannot 
claim  as  a  design  of  finite  intelligence  what  never  presented  itself 
in  that  character  to  any  single  mind.     The  leader  of  a  Greek 
colony  to  Ionia  in  the  eighth  or  ninth  century,  B.C.,  was  certainly 
paving  the  way  for  Christianity ;  but  his  relation  to  it,  though  in 
a  higher  way  of  working,  was  essentially  that  of  a  coral  insect  to 
a  coral  reef.    Neither  Christianity  nor  the  coral  reef  were  ever  any 
design  of  the  men  or   insect  who   constructed   them;   they  lay 
altogether  deeper  in  the  roots  of  things ;  and  this,  as  I  hold,  carries 
with  it  the  conclusion  which  in  principle  must  be  accepted  about 
evolution." 9     In   brief,    they   builded   better   than   they   knew. 
"Teleology  does  not  come  out  of  the  empty  mind ;  it  is  the  focusing 
of  external  things  together  until  they  reveal  their  internal  life."  10 
The  principle  of  value  then  is  identical,  in  the  human  order 


Ibid.,  pp.  152-153. 
Ibid.,  pp.  154-155. 
'Ibid..  r>.  166. 


10  Ibid.,  p.  166, 


212  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

and  in  the  universe,  with  the  principle  of  spirituality  or  person- 
ality. And  the  meaning  of  the  latter  is  the  organized  spiritual 
harmony  which  is  found  and  enjoyed  in  the  greater  experiences  of 
life — in  an  impulse  from  a  vernal  wood,  in  the  devotion  of  comrade 
to  comrade,  of  lover  to  the  beloved,  of  man  to  God,  of  the  artist 
and  the  art  lover  to  beauty,  of  the  scholar  and  the  thinker  to  truth, 
of  men  in  general  to  justice  and  fellowship  in  the  social  order. 
Teleological  interpretation  of  the  universe  means  really  an  axio- 
Jogical  interpretation,  an  interpretation  in  terms  of  value  and  per-  • 
sonality.  The  notions  of  purposive  striving,  willing,  of  ends  and 
means,  are  subordinate  to  the  notions  of  value  and  personality. 

From  our  standpoint  reality  at  its  highest  level  is  a  community 
of  persons,  an  order  of  individuals.  From  this  standpoint  natural 
law  or  cosmical  law  has  not  the  position  of  a  legislative  principle 
imposed  upon  the  constituent  individuals  which  make  up  the 
universal  order.  The  elements  of  reality  are  not  mere  exemplifica- 
tions of  natural  laws.  The  laws  of  physics,  chemistry,  biology, 
psychology,  sociology,  are  formulations  of  the  various  subordinate 
orders,  or  regular  modes  of  behavior,  of  individuals  in  relation. 
Natural  law  is  an  abstract  or  partial  statement  of  the  order  that 
does  obtain  in  the  relations  of  individuals ;  legal  and  moral  law 
of  the  relations  which  should  but  do  not  always  obtain.  In  both 
types  a  law  is  an  abstract  partial  statement  of  an  order  and  of  the 
relations  of  individuals  as  members  of  an  order. 

The  ultimate  problem  of  philosophy  is  that  of  the  place  of 
personality  in  the  cosmical  order;  the  problems  of  the  value  of 
personality  and  of  the  value  of  existence  as  a  whole  are  but  two 
aspects  of  this  fundamental  problem.  One's  conception  of  the 
value  of  existence  must  grow  out  of  his  conception  of  the  place  of 
personality  in  the  cosmos;  and  on  one's  conception  of  what  per- 
sonality is  and  what  nature  is  depends  one's  conception  of  the  place 
of  personality  in  the  cosmos.  We  shall  next  consider  the  nature  of 
nature,  with  special  regard  to  the  place  therein  of  life  and  mind, 
making  no  attempt  to  formulate  more  than  an  outline  philosophy 
of  nature.  This  will  furnish  a  background  for  a  more  detailed 
consideration  of  the  nature  of  personality ;  then  we  shall  be  ready 
to  face,  as  best  we  can,  the  last  riddle  of  the  sphinx — the  place  of 
personality  in  the  cosmos. 


BOOK  III 
EMPIRICAL  EXISTENTS 


CHAPTER  XVIII 


SPACE  AND  TIME 


Hitherto  we  have  been  considering  the  more  formal  or  logical 
features  of  reality.  Identity  and  diversity,  discreteness  and  con- 
tinuity, individuality  and  universality,  number  and  quantity, 
order,  causality  and  substance,  are  the  most  fundamental  logical 
features  of  the  structure  of  reality  as  a  whole.  Any  universe,  and 
any  partial  system  not  a  universe,  must,  in  so  far  as  intelligible, 
be  a  system  of  entities  in  relation  and  therefore  be  discrete  and 
continuous,  individual  and  universal.  Any  universe  must  be  an 
order  of  entities  in  relation  and  therefore  denumerable.  For 
number  is  essentially  an  orderly  determination  in  formal  or  ab- 
stract time,  and  expresses  nothing  but  the  ordered  series  of  enti- 
ties. Time  is  the  order  of  succession  or  before  and  after.  Space 
is  the  order  of  simultaneity  or  coexistence.  The  concept  of  num- 
ber, we  have  seen,  arises  through  the  analysis  and  synthesis  of 
qualitative  differences  in  experience,  and  the  application  of  number 
to  things  requires  the  recognition  of  qualitative  likenesses  and  dif- 
ferences. Numerical  order  and  magnitude  are  the  most  formal 
and  abstract  ways  of  discriminating  and  relating,  in  terms  of  dis- 
creteness and  continuity,  the  qualitative  wealth  of  empirical 
reality.  Numbering  is  the  formulation  of  an  order  system  of  rela- 
tions for  the  qualitative  complex  of  empirical  reality.  It  is  through 
time  and  space  that  identity  and  diversity,  the  individual  and  the 
universal,  number  and  quantity  and  the  other  categories  become 
concrete.  Regularity  of  space  relations  is  one  determinate  aspect 
of  the  regularity,  or  the  relation  of  order,  which  is  the  final  ground 
of  number  and  mathematics.  The  regular  order  of  temporal  suc- 
cession is  an  abstractive  construction  from  experience  symbolized  by 
number  series. 

In  passing  from  identity  and  diversity,  continuity  and  dis- 
creteness, through  number,  to  space  and  time,  we  are  following  the 
order  of  increasing  concreteness  or  specification  in  our  considera- 

215 


216  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

tion  of  the  structural  character  of  empirical  reality,  and  our  next 
step,  after  considering  space  and  time,  will  be  to  consider  things 
and  persons.  We  are  not  here  attempting  to  deduce  concrete 
reality  from  the  concepts  of  identity  and  diversity,  for  we  have 
insisted  all  along  that  these  formal  concepts  are  built  up  by  the 
analytic-synthetic  activity  of  intelligence  operative  in  the  organiza- 
tion of  experience. 

Common  sense  thinks  of  space  and  time  as  substances  or  real 
existents,  in  which  things  are  contained  and  events  happen.  The 
Newtonian  doctrine  of  absolute  space  and  absolute  time,  which 
seems  to  have  generally  prevailed  among  physicists  up  to  the 
advent  of  Minkowski  and  Einstein,  is  but  a  mathematical  extension 
of  the  common  sense  view.  Empty  space  and  empty  time  are  taken 
to  exist  independently  of  things  and  events.  Berkeley  criticized 
severely  Newton's  doctrine  of  absolute  space,  time  and  motion.1 
For  Berkeley,  of  course,  space  is  nothing  but  the  order  of  coexist- 
ence, and  time  the  order  of  succession,  in  the  ideas  of  finite  spirits. 
Liebniz  held  that  space  is  the  order  of  coexistence  among  the 
activities  of  the  monads,  and  time  the  order  of  succession  in  the 
activities  of  the  monads.  In  his  controversy  with  Samuel  Clarke, 
the  disciple  of  Newton,  Leibniz  argued  that  Newton's  doctrine  of 
absolute  space  and  time  would  make  God  a  finite  being  conditioned 
by  space  and  time.  I  hold  that  Leibniz's  theory  is,  in  principle, 
correct  and  that  it  has  been  vindicated  by  the  recent  development 
of  the  physical  theory  of  relativity.2  Space  and  time  are  relative 
to  the  changes  and  experiences  of  finite  beings.  What  may  corre- 
spond to  them  in  the  supreme  order  of  the  universe,  or  in  other 
words,  what  may  be  the  ultimate  ground  of  the  space  and  time 
orders,  I  shall  consider  briefly  at  the  end  of  this  chapter  and  more 
fully  in  Chapters  XXXV  and  XXXVII. 

The  chief  questions,  for  philosophy,  in  regard  to  space  and 
time  are  these:  (1)  In  what  sense  are  space  and  time  real?  (2) 
Are  they  relative  or  absolute?     (3)  Are  they  boundless  and  in- 


1  See  Berkeley,  Principles  of  Human  Knowledge,  paragraphs  110-117, 
123-132;  and  Essay  Towards  a  New  Theory  of  Vision. 

2  The  best,  brief  treatment  of  the  relativity  of  space  and  time  in  its  gen- 
eral philosophical  and  historical  aspects  that  I  am  acquainted  with  is  Dr.  H. 
Wildon  Carr's,  The  General  Principle  of  Relativity.  On  the  philosophical 
bearings  of  the  Einstein  theory  I  have  found  two  good  brochures  in  German — 
Moritz  Geiger,  Die  philosophische  Bedeutung  der  Relativitatstheorie ;  Ernst 
Cassirer,  Zur  Einstein 'schen  Relativitatstheorie ;  both  of  date  1921. 


SPACE  AND  TIME  217 

finitely  divisible  or  Lave  they  bounds  and  ultimate  elements  (points 
and  instants)  ?  (4)  How  are  they  related?  Are  they  correlative 
or  independent  dimensions  ?  All  these  questions  are  interwoven. 
The  answer  to  one  implies  answers  to  the  others.  If,  for  instance, 
as  I  shall  argue,  space  and  time  are  relative,  they  are  real  as 
aspects  or  attributes  of  existence ;  but  they  cannot  be  independent 
entities.  If  they  are  both  relative  and  real,  they  may  be,  in  some 
sense,  finite  and  correlative. 

Zeno,  the  Eleatic,  developed  the  contradictions  in  regard  to 
motion  and  change  involved  in  admitting  the  reality  of  space,  time, 
motion  and  multiplicity.  Since  his  day  philosophers  and  mathe- 
maticians have  puzzled  their  heads  over  the  questions  of  the 
boundlessness  of  space,  the  endlessness  of  time  and  the  existence 
of  the  infinitesimal.  Zeno's  conclusion  from  his  paradoxes  was  that 
motion,  change  and  multiplicity  are  illusory.  Kant,  in  his  mathe- 
matical antimonies,  gave  a  fresh  statement  of  the  contradictions 
involved  in  thinking  space  and  time  as  absolute.3  Kant  admitted 
the  universal  empirical  validity  of  physics  and  mathematics ;  so  the 
only  way  out  of  the  deadlock  for  him  was  to  say  that  space  and 
time  are  universal  forms  of  finite  experience,  but  not  conditions 
of  the  existence  of  noumenal  realities  or  things-in-themselves.  For 
Kant  the  noumenal  entities — God  and  the  free  and  immortal  soul 
— are,  theoretically,  mere  hypotheses  that  give  completeness  to 
thought ;  they  are  regulative  ideals.  Practically  they  are  postu- 
lates of  moral  faith.  But  Kant  does  not  attempt  to  render  an 
intelligible  account  of  the  relation  of  the  spatial-temporal  world 
of  nature  to  the  timeless  and  spaceless  noumena.  His  idealistic 
successors  struggled  in  vain  with  this  problem.  F.  H.  Bradley 
shows  that,  if  space  and  time  be  taken  to  exist  as  such,  they  are 
riddled  with  contradictions ;  therefore  they  are  mere  appearances.4 
But  Mr.  Bradley  does  not  explain  what  place  these  appearances 
have  in  the  timeless  and  seamless  whole  of  the  absolute.  M. 
Bergson  resolves  the  contradictions  by  making  space  and  time  to  be 
intellectual  distortions  of  the  true  reality  which  is  duration  or 
change ;  but  he  does  not  seem  to  find  any  place  for  a  supertemporal 
order.5      Mr.    Bertrand    Russell    finds    the    solution    of    Zeno's 


*  See  Critique  of  Pure  Reason,  Second  Division,  Book  ii,  Chap.  2. 

*  See  Appearance  and  Reality,  Chaps.  4  and  18. 

B  See  Time  and  Free  Will,  Chap.  2 ;  and  Creative  Evolution,  especially  pp. 
325-330. 


218  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

paradoxes  in  the  new  mathematical  theory  of  continuity.  Space 
and  time  consist  of  discrete  points  and  instants.  These  con- 
stitute compact  infinite  series;  thus,  in  any  finite  portion  of 
space  and  interval  of  time  there  is  an  infinite  number  of 
points  and  instants;  between  any  two  points  or  instants  there 
is  always  another;  thus,  there  is  no  next  point  to  any  point 
and  no  next  instant  to  any  instant,  although  there  is  nothing 
between  any  two  points  but  points  and  nothing  between  any 
two  instants  but  instants.  A  finite  space  is  traversed  in  a 
finite  time  because  there  is  a  one-one  correspondence  between  the 
infinite  series  of  points  and  instants  which  make  up,  respectively, 
the  finite  stretches  of  space  and  time.6  To  me  this  solution  is  no 
solution,  since  I  do  not  understand  either  how  an  actual  stretch  of 
space  can  be  made  up  of  an  innumerable  number  of  dimensionless 
points  or  how  an  actual  interval  of  duration  can  be  made  up  of  an 
innumerable  number  of  durationless  instants.7 

The  first  step  towards  a  clear  understanding  of  the  problems  of 
space  and  time  is  to  distinguish  between  three  ideas  that  are  fre- 
quently confused :  ( 1 )  the  spatial  and  temporal  attributes  or  quali- 
ties of  our  experience  (of  both  sense  data  and  data  of  introspec- 
tion);  (2)  mathematical  or  conceptual  space  and  time;  (3) 
physical  space  and  time.  I  proceed  to  discuss  the  distinctions  and 
relations  between  these  three  sets  of  ideas.  I  ask  the  reader  to  bear 
in  mind  that  while,  for  brevity  of  statement,  I  speak  of  "empir- 
ical," "conceptual"  and  "physical"  space  and  time,  these  distinc- 
tions refer,  not  to  different  entities,  but  to  different  modes  of 
thinking  space  and  time.  There  can  be  only  one  ultimately  real 
or  existent  space  and  time — the  physical  or  cosmical  space  and 
time.  I  leave,  for  later  consideration,  the  question  of  the  relation 
between  "subjective"  or  "mental"  time  and  cosmical  time  (Chap- 
ter 37). 

I.     Empirical  Space  and  Time 

The  spatial  and  temporal  attributes  of  sensory  and  introspective 
data.  All  the  data  of  experience  have  duration  or  protensity. 
They  are  events,  which  occur  and  recur  and  extend  over  one 
another.     They  have  empirical  simultaneity  and  successiveness. 

•  See  Eussell,  Principles  of  Mathematics,  Chap.  42,  and  Our  Knowledge 
of  the  External  World,  Chap.  5. 

'See  further  Appendix  to  Chap.  35:    "The  Infinite." 


SPACE  AND  TIME  219 

Some  of  these  data  have  extensity  or  voluminousness.  The  data  of 
sight,  touch,  kinsesthesis,  taste  and  smell  directly,  and  of  sound  indi- 
rectly by  association,  have  voluminousness.  I  think  that  certain 
inward  experiences  of  thought  and  feeling  are  devoid  of  extensive 
quality,  but  certainly  our  bodily  feelings,  pleasurable  and  painful, 
seem  to  have  extensity  associated  with  them.  So  far  as  concerns 
the  external  world,  at  least,  our  data  are  both  extensive  and  pro- 
tensive;  the  facts  of  nature  are  space-time  facts.  The  things  we 
perceive  as  extensive  coexist  and  succeed  one  another ;  they  endure 
and  they  change.  The  repetition  of  empirical  data  leads  us  to 
believe  in  the  permanence  or  perduration  of  objects;  a  physical 
object  is  a  thing  that  endures  8  or  recurs  in  different  event-settings. 
Empirical  extensions  and  durations  are  finite  and  hetero- 
geneous or  discrete.  No  two  stretches  of  experienced  duration  or 
extensity,  or  perhaps  one  might  better  say  no  two  stretches  of 
extensity-duration,  are  precisely  alike.  It  is  obvious  that  our 
experiences  of  our  durations  as  living  constitute  a  succession  of 
heterogeneous  specious  presents  strung  together  in  memory.  It  is 
not  so  obvious,  but  it  is  none  the  less  true,  that  the  extensity  quali- 
ties of  experience  are  heterogeneous.  The  extensity  quality  of 
vision  is  not  the  same  as  that  of  touch,  taste,  or  sound.  Even  the 
tactual  qualities  yielded  by  the  tip  of  the  finger  and  the  tip  of  the 
tongue  in  the  exploration  of  a  cavity  in  a  tooth  are  discrepant. 
The  space  of  a  dream  is  discontinuous  with  the  space  of  a  waking 
experience.  I  need  not  multiply  instances,  from  the  psychology  of 
space  perception,  of  the  heterogeneity  of  empirical  space  qualities. 
Similarly,  the  duration  qualities  of  experience  are  notoriously 
heterogeneous.  One  lives  much  faster  in  one  hour  than  in  another. 
Suppose  fifty  people  hear  a  lecture,  of  which  the  clock  time  was  one 
hour.  There  may  be  fifty  different  experienced  durations.  One 
person  may  have  thought  the  clock  time  of  the  lecture  about  ten 
minutes  and  another  person  may  have  thought  it  about  ten  hours. 

II.  Conceptual  Space  and  Time 

How  do  the  concepts  of  one  homogeneous  and  unchanging 
space-whole  and  of  one  continuous  and  evenly  flowing  time  order 
arise  from  the  multiplicity  of  heterogeneous  perceptions  by  indi- 

8  See  Dr.  A.  N.  "Whitehead 's  very  striking  analysis  of  nature  as  duration, 
in  his  Principles  of  Natural  Knovjledge  and  The  Concept  of  Nature. 


220  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

vi duals  ?  I  think  it  is  obvious,  upon  a  little  examination,  that  the 
mathematical  concepts  of  space  and  time  are  the  last  steps  in  the 
construction,  by  analytical  abstraction  and  synthesis,  of  the  notion 
of  a  common  world  order  which  has  its  roots  in  the  needs,  postu- 
lates and  conventions  of  the  social  life.  The  individual  finds  him- 
self from  the  outset,  in  a  social  world — a  world  of  interplay  be- 
tween himself  and  other  selves.  He  is  prone  to  take  every  other 
center  of  action  and  resistance  to  be  a  self.  He  must  imagine  and 
conceive  a  common  space  as  the  theater  of  interaction  between 
selves.  The  other  self  and  himself  meet  constantly  in  conflict  and 
in  cooperation.  As  his  field  of  actual  and  possible  social  interplay 
is  enlarged,  just  so  his  concept  of  the  common  space  whole  is 
widened.  As  his  social  contacts  increase  in  variety,  depth  and 
orderliness,  just  so  his  concept  of  a  common  space  grows  in  refine- 
ment and  stability,  grows  as  an  instrument  of  practical  and  logical 
manipulation. 

Similarly  with  time.  The  individual's  consciousness  of  his 
own  lived  duration  is  enriched  through  social  interplay.  His  own 
duration  overlaps  and  is  overlapped  by  the  durations  of  other 
lives.  The  sequence  of  the  generations,  the  rise,  persistence  and 
decay  of  custom  and  tradition,  at  first  orally  and  later  by  written 
record,  enlarge  his  consciousness  of  duration.  The  history  of  his 
physical  environment  is  closely  interwoven  with  the  history  of  his 
family,  tribe,  city,  state  and  nation.  Thus  man's  time  conscious- 
ness is  enlarged,  until  finally  the  origin  and  evolution  not  only  of 
the  human  race  but  of  the  whole  life  process  is  interwoven  with 
the  history  of  the  universe.  From  the  Alcheringa  myths  of  the 
central  Australian  savage  down  to  the  latest  form  of  the  evolution 
theory  the  notion  of  the  time  process  keeps  step  with  the  develop- 
ment of  the  concepts  of  social  life  and  order.  As  a  social  indi- 
vidual man  is  under  the  practical  necessity  of  marking  off  briefer 
and  longer  rhythms  of  durations.  If  he  were  a  hermit  animal  he 
would  need  to  take  note  only  of  the  cruder  physiological  and  sea- 
sonal rhythms.  But  as  a  social  being  he  must  have  a  time  for 
everything — a  time  to  eat  and  sleep,  to  work  and  play,  to  go  to 
school,  to  marry,  to  conduct  public  affairs,  to  pray,  etc. ;  yes,  even 
to  tinker  at  the  social  order  itself.9     In  order  that  men  may  co- 

8  On  the  history  of  the  time  concept  compare  the  article  by  James  T. 
Shotwell :  ' '  The  Discovery  of  Time ' '  in  the  Journal  of  Philosophy,  Psychology 
and  Scientific  Methods,  Vol.  xii,  pp.  197  ff.,  253  ff.,  309  ff. 


SPACE  AND   TIME  221 

operate  they  must  agree  upon  methods  for  measuring  intervals  of 
duration.  All  the  methods  and  standards  of  time  measurement, 
from  the  hour  glass  and  the  clepsydra  to  the  apparent  diurnal  mo- 
tion of  the  fixed  stars,  consist  in  closer  approximations,  by  means 
of  a  nearer  approach  toward  an  invariant  rhythmical  movement, 
toward  an  invariant  order  of  succession.  Every  improved  measure 
of  time  is  an  asymptotical  approach,  by  social  convention,  to  the 
ideal  limit  of  an  absolute  rhythmical  movement. 

Time  is  measured  in  terms  of  space  and  space  in  terms  of 
time.  Strictly  speaking,  all  determinations  of  space  and  time  must 
begin  from  the  "now-here"  of  the  individual.  '"Here"  is  "now," 
and  "now"  is  "here" ;  thus  the  simplest  fact  of  experience  is  a 
space-time  fact — "an  event  particle,"  as  Dr.  "Whitehead  puts  it. 
But,  for  all  social  purposes,  we  must  assume  that  the  empirical 
space  of  the  individual  is  continuous,  respectively,  with  the  spaces 
of  other  coexisting  individuals  and  his  time  coincident  with  their 
times  and  continuous  with  the  durations  of  succeeding  individuals 
and  groups.  Thus  I  believe  that  the  space-time  of  my  here-now 
is  a  component  of  the  one  space-time  whole  of  contemporaneous 
"nature"  and  "society" ;  and  that  the  duration  of  my  here-now 
is  a  moment  in  the  one  continuous  temporal  order.  The  space 
order  is  conceived  to  be  reversible  and  therefore  absolutely  con- 
tinuous, whereas  the  time  order  is  irreversible  and  therefore,  thus 
far,  discrete.  This  difference  is  due  to  the  fact  that  there  lingers 
in  our  most  abstract  notion  of  time  a  vestige  of  the  experience  of 
life  as  a  succession  of  heterogenous  specious  presents,  whereas  pure 
space  is  abstract  simultaneity.  On  the  other  haud  empirical  space, 
like  empirical  time,  involves  heterogeneity.  The  differences  be- 
tween two  nows  in  an  individual  or  between  the  contemporaneous 
nows  of  two  individuals  may  be  no  less  a  spatial  than  a  temporal 
difference.  What  I  feel  now  may  depend  on  where  I  am,  just  as 
truly  as  where  I  am  depends  on  what  I  feel.  The  rawest  facts,  the 
hardest  data  of  experience,  arte  space-time  facts. 

Mathematical  or  pure  space  and  time  are  conceived  to  be  homo- 
geneous, absolutely  continuous,  infinitely  divisible,  and,  respect- 
ively, boundless  and  endless.  There  are  no  heterogeneous  heres 
and  theres,  rights  and  lefts,  in  pure  space ;  no  discrete  nows  in  the 
even  flow  of  pure  time.  Pure  space  and  time  are  simply  the  last 
stages  in  the  setting  up,  by  analytic  abstraction  and  synthetic  con- 
struction and  for  social  purposes,  of  absolutely  homogeneous  space 


222  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

and  time.  The  empirical  space  and  time  orders  are  eviscerated 
of  all  sensuous  and  dynamic  content  and  are  conceived,  re- 
spectively, as  a  three  dimensional  reversible  order  and  a  one 
directional  irreversible  order.  The  order  of  simultaneous  relations 
becomes  the  space  of  pure  geometry.  The  order  of  pure  succession 
becomes  the  time  of  arithmetic.  A  conceived  realm  of  pure  posi- 
tions and  directions,  of  positions  occupied  by  nothing  and  of  direc- 
tions in  which  nothing  moves  but  pure  movement,  is  of  course 
logically  continuous  and  boundless,  to  any  extent  one  pleases. 

An  order  of  succession  in  which  nothing  succeeds  anything  else 
except  pure  moments  is  of  course  logically  continuous  and  endless, 
according  to  the  rules  of  the  logical  game.  But  such  a  space  and 
time  exist  only  in  the  mind  of  him  who  thinks  them.  They  are  as 
absolute  as  one  pleases  because  there  are  no  inconvenient  facts  to 
mar  their  absoluteness.  An  infinite  continuous  order  of  dimen- 
sionless  points  has  nothing  to  do  with  actual  space.  An  infinite 
continuous  order  of  timeless  instants  has  nothing  to  do  with  actual 
time.  The  development  of  logically  consistent  systems  of  geometry 
which  set  out  from  definitions  and  postulates  other  than  those  of 
Euclidian  geometry  affords  capital  illustration  of  the  nonactual 
or  nonempirical  character  of  pure  space;  and  the  paradoxical  de- 
velopments of  number  theory,  with  its  transfinites  and  new 
infinites,  illustrates  the  nonactual  character  of  pure  time.  In  the 
realm  of  pure  formal  logic  we  have  to  do  simply  with  highly  con- 
ventionalized symbols,  with  nonexistent  terms  and  relations  belong- 
ing to  purely  speculative  games.  I  may  remark,  in  passing,  that 
the  traditional  metaphysician  who  develops  a  camel  out  of  his 
inner  consciousness  would  be  much  more  at  home  among  specu- 
lative mathematicians  than  among  philosophers  of  to-day.  It  is 
possible  to  continue  the  process  of  abstractive  construction  to  the 
point  of  developing  space  theories  from  which  the  qualities  of 
empirical  space  have  vanished,  and  to  construct  theories  of  number 
from  which  quantity  has  vanished.  Indeed  these  things  are  being 
done. 

I  do  not,  of  course,  mean  that  the  conceptions  of  one  limitless 
and  continuous  space  whole  and  of  one  evenly  flowing  and  limitless 
time  are  created  out  of  nothing  for  the  satisfaction  of  social  needs. 
What  I  do  mean  is  that  the  absolute  homogeneity,  continuity  and 
limitlessness,  of  pure  space  and  time  are  the  results  of  a  convenient 
abstraction  from  the  heterogeneity  and  discontinuity  of  the  actual 


SPACE  AND  TIME  223 

spatial  and  temporal  orders.  All  that  is  local  and  particular  is 
thought  away  and  the  abstract  forms  (the  Kantian  intuitions)  of 
space  and  time  are  set  up  as  real  entities. 

III.    Physical  Space  and  Time 

I  mean  by  physical  space  and  time  objectively  real  space  and 
time,  and  I  propose  to  show:  (1)  that  they  are  both  correlative 
and  relative,  (2)  that  they  imply  a  trans-spatial  and  super- 
temporal  order. 

Whatever  be  the  case  with  regard  to  mental  durations,  it  is 
certainly  true  that  physical  durations  are  extensive  as  well  as  pro- 
tensive.  In  nature  time  is  the  soul  of  which  space  is  the  body, 
as  Dr.  Alexander  picturesquely  puts  it.10  The  events  of  nature 
endure  and  pass,  but  they  are  never  disembodied  events.  By 
abstractive  construction  there  are  formed  timeless  spaces  for  time 
systems ;  and,  as  Dr.  Whitehead  says,  "A  point  is  really  an  abso- 
lute position  in  the  timeless  space  of  a  given  time  system.11  But 
dimensionless  points  and  timeless  instants  are  metaphysical  non- 
entities. Whether  the  same  is  true  of  spaceless  duration  remains 
to  be  seen.  I  have  already  called  attention  to  the  fact  that  our 
estimates  of  space  and  time  are  relative  to  one  another  and  I  shall 
not  labor  their  correlativity  here.  Both  Dr.  Whitehead  and  Dr. 
Alexander  have,  from  different  points  of  approach,  abundantly 
established  the  correlativity  of  space  and  time.  The  physical 
theory  of  relativity  involves  the  same  conception,  but  I  think  it  is 
unfortunate  that  Einstein  and  his  disciples  speak  of  time  as  the 
fourth  dimension  of  space,  thereby  confusing  the  actual  correla- 
tivity of  space  and  time  with  the  dubious  notions  of  non-Euclidian 
hyperbolic  space.12  Space  and  time  are  correlated  aspects  of 
nature,  but  if  one  of  these  aspects  be  more  fundamental  than 
another  it  is  time  or  duration.  Nature  is,  as  Dr.  Whitehead  puts 
it,  passage  or  creative  advance.  On  the  other  hand,  nature  is  not 
passage  so  swift  that  mind  cannot  grasp  or  think  it.  The  passage 
of  mind  back  and  forth  through  the  successive  and  overlapping 
events  of  nature  is  so  much  swifter  than  the  passage  of  nature  that 

10  See  his  Space,  Time  and  Deity,  passim. 

II  See  his  The  Concept  of  Nature,  especially  Chaps.  3,  4  and  8. 

12 1  am  unable  to  attach  any  definite  meaning  to  a  nonuniform  space. 
Space  as  a  whole  cannot  bend ;  a  curved  space  is  a  contour  or  spatial  relation 
of  something  spatial,  that  is,  material,  not  of  space  itself. 


224  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

mind  is  able  to  identify  or  recognize,  in  the  recurrences  of  events, 
permanences.  The  permanences  in  the  qualities  and  relations  of 
natural  events  constitute  the  objectively  real  space  order.  Space, 
as  a  human  idea,  is  the  imaginative  and  conceptual  way  of  cog- 
nizing the  order  of  coexistence  in  the  qualities  and  relations  of 
nature.  Time,  as  a  human  idea,  is  the  imaginative  and  conceptual 
way  of  cognizing  the  orderly  succession  in  the  passage  of  nature 
and  its  creative  advance,  and  in  the  passage  of  human  nature  and 
its  creative  advance. 

The  paradoxes  of  Zeno,  the  Kantian  antimonies,  the  Bradleyan 
doctrine  that  space  and  time  are  mere  contradictory  appearances 
and  all  theories  of  a  similar  character,  have  their  roots  in  the 
assumption  that,  if  space  and  time  are  real,  they  must  be  absolute 
entities.  Such  notions  arise  from  hypostatizing  the  abstract  con- 
structions of  pure  mathematical  space  and  time.  In  order  to  find 
a  common  basis  for  action  and  thought,  man  has  assumed  that  his 
systems  of  reference  for  estimating  motion,  velocity,  distance  and 
magnitude  are  absolute  and  has  set  up  as  metaphysical  entities  the 
mere  abstract  frameworks  of  his  movements  and  calculations. 

I  will  not  enter  here  into  an  extended  account  of  the  physical 
theory  of  relativity.  The  literature  on  this  subject  is  abundant.13 
Moreover,  I  have  no  competence  to  discuss  the  more  recondite 
physical  and  mathematical  aspects  of  the  subject.  It  seems  clear, 
however,  that  the  result  of  the  famous  Michelson-Morley  experi- 
ment implies  that  we  have  no  means  of  finding  an  absolute  stand- 
ard for  the  measurement  of  movement.  All  our  estimates  of  move- 
ment are  relative  to  our  systems  of  reference.  This  has  long  been 
recognized  to  be  true  for  every  sort  of  movement  except  that  of 
light,  which  has  a  constant  velocity  of  300,000  kilometers  per 
second.  If  I  were  traveling  east  in  a  train  going  at  the  rate  of 
sixty  miles  per  hour  and  a  train  should  pass  in  the  opposite  direc- 
tion at  the  same  rate  it  would  for  me  be  going  twice  as  rapidly. 
If  I  were  walking  toward  the  back  of  the  car  at  the  rate  of  four 
miles  per  hour  the  west  bound  train  would  not  be  going  quite  as 

II  See  A.  Einstein,  The  Theory  of  Relativity;  A.  Eddington,  Space,  Time 
and  Gravitation;  M.  Schlick,  Space  and  Time  in  Contemporary  Physics;  C.  D. 
Broad,  "Euclid,  Newton  and  Einstein,"  in  Hiooert  Journal,  Vol.  xviii, 
1919-1920,  pp.  425-458;  and  the  symposium  by  Eddington,  Eoss,  Broad  and 
Lindemann  in  Mind,  Vol.  xxix,  pp.  415-444. 

A  simple  introduction  to  the  subject  is  E.  E.  Slosson's  Easy  Lessons  in 
Einstein. 


SPACE  AND   TIME  225 

fast.  If  the  train  be  moving  along  the  equator,  the  portion  of  the 
earth  over  which  I  am  traveling  is  going  westward  at  the  rate  of 
1000  miles  an  hour.  For  an  observer  outside  the  earth  I  would 
be  traveling  west  at  940  miles  per  hour.  The  earth  is  traveling 
around  the  sun  at  the  rate  of  18.6  miles  per  second.  The  solar 
system  is  traveling  through  space  in  some  direction  at  an  unknown 
velocity  and  at  this  point  our  system  of  reference  reaches  a  limit. 
We  substitute  one  system  of  reference  for  another  until  we  come 
to  the  end  of  our  tether.  I  need  not  multiply  examples  of  the 
relativity  of  our  estimates  of  spatial  movement.  Inasmuch  as  we 
measure  temporal  change  in  terms  of  spatial  movement  the  rela- 
tivity of  space  measurements  carries  with  it  the  relativity  of  time 
measurements.  We  have  no  means  of  measuring  simultaneity 
except  the  empirical  one  of  simultaneous  light  signals ;  but  there 
can  be  no  absolute  simultaneity  for  observers  transmitting  and 
receiving  signals  if  they  are  on  different  platforms  moving  rela- 
tively to  one  another,  and  therefore  with  different  systems  of 
reference.  The  apparently  constant  velocity  of  light  is,  according 
to  Einstein,  due  to  the  deformation  of  the  axes  of  coordination 
used  by  one  observer  as  seen  by  another.  "Thus  to  an  observer  in 
a  system  moving  relatively  and  uniformly  to  us  at  half  the  speed 
of  light  our  proportions  are  foreshortened  to  half  what  they  appear 
to  us,  so  that  measuring  the  propagation  of  light  our  unit  is  double 
that  of  his,  and  his  is  correspondingly  half  that  of  ours.  Each 
observer,  therefore,  finds  the  light  propagated  at  the  same  velocity 
of  300,000  kilometers  a  second,  but  the  kilometers  used  by  the  one 
appear  to  the  observer  in  the  rapidly  moving  system  elongated  to 
double  their  length,  and  those  used  by  the  observer  in  the  rapidly 
moving  system  appear  halved  in  their  proportion  to  the  observer  in 
the  slow  moving  system."  14 

If  a  passenger  in  a  smoothly  traveling  train  watches  a  stone 
dropped  from  the  train  it  seems  to  him  to  describe  a  straight  line. 
For  an  observer  in  a  position  on  the  bank  fixed  with  reference  to 
the  train  the  path  of  the  stone  is  a  curve.  If  two  observers  at  equal 
distances  from  a  point  on  an  electric  railway  see  a  flash  at  that 
ooint  they  see  it  at  the  same  instant,  but  if  two  observers  equi- 
distant on  the  electric  train  see  the  flash  it  will  not  be  at  the  same 
instant,  since,  during  the  propagation  of  the  light,  one  observer 

M  Carr,  The  Principle  of  Belativity,  pp.  134,  135. 


226  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

will  have  moved  away  from  it  and  another  towards  it.  There  is  no 
absolute  simultaneity.  Two  events  which  are  simultaneous  for 
observers  on  one  system  of  reference  are  successive  for  observers  on 
another  system  of  reference.15  And  we  have  no  absolute  system 
of  reference.  From  our  system  of  reference  on  the  earth  the 
firmament  appears  to  be  moving  and  a  falling  apple  appears  to 
move  with  it  towards  rest  on  the  earth.  But  for  an  observer  at  rest 
outside  our  system,  and  for  whom  the  earth  and  its  surrounding 
bodies  are  rotating,  the  movement  would  appear  to  be  that  of  the 
earth  towards  the  apple.  We  have  learned  to  think  of  the  earth  as 
moving  and  the  firmament  as  at  rest.  But  we  have  no  criterion  of 
a  system  at  absolute  rest.  Theoretically,  it  is  just  as  correct  to  say 
that  the  station  and  the  landscape  move  past  the  train  as  it  is  to 
say  that  the  train  moves  past  them,  that  the  earth  moves  toward 
the  apple  as  that  the  apple  moves  toward  the  earth.  The  relativity 
of  space  and  time  measurements  to  the  systems  of  reference  of  the 
observer  means  that  empirical  space  and  time  are  really  the  orders 
in  which  observers  perceive  and  estimate  the  relations  of  coexist- 
ences and  successions  in  the  data  of  their  experience.  If  there 
were  no  observers  in  the  universe  the  nonsentient  things  that  were 
left  might  still  coexist  and  succeed  one  another  in  certain  orders, 
but  we  can  form  no  conception  of  what  these  orders  might  be  since 
every  actual  order  of  coexistence  and  succession  is  a  perspective 
from  our  own  system  of  reference. 

On  the  other  hand,  it  is  an  error  to  infer,  from  the  relativity  of 
our  human  estimates  of  velocity  or  space-time,  that  space  and  time 
do  not  involve  anything  invariant  or  absolute;  or  that  they  are 
merely  "phenomenal"  in  the  sense  of  "unreal."  The  new  theory 
of  relativity,  if  I  understand  its  import,  is  a  mathematical  method 
of  transforming  sets  of  equations  for  one  system  of  reference  into 
sets  for  other  systems  of  reference.  This  method  implies  the 
reality  of  an  invariant  order.  I  cannot  find  any  meaning  in  the 
assertion  that  space  and  time  are  phenomena,  unless  I  am  told  what 
they  are  phenomena  of.  To  say  that  space  is  the  appearance  of  the 
intercourse  of  coexisting  real  being  is  just  to  say  that  space  is  the 


18  We  can  conceive  an  observer  moving  away  from  the  earth  with  a  speed 
in  excess  of  the  velocity  of  light.  For  him  our  time  order  would  be  reversed. 
See  Chas.  Nordmann,  La  Mecanique  D 'Einstein  in  Bevue  des  deux  Mondes, 
Vol.  Ixv,  p.  15.    Oct.  1921,  pp.  925-946. 


SPACE  AND  TIME  227 

appearance  of  an  extended  world  order.  The  real  world  has  ex- 
tensity.  Similarly,  our  part  of  the  universe,  at  least,  is  on  the 
move ;  it  has  a  history ;  every  member  of  it  has  a  history ;  therefore, 
time  is  real. 

To  say  that  space  and  time  are  correlative  is  simply  to  say  that 
the  actual  world  system  is  not  something  which  exists  without 
change.  There  is  no  existent  that  does  not  traffic  with  other  exist- 
ents  in  time.  If  there  be  a  God  who  is  more  than  an  otiose  abstrac- 
tion, who  really  does  deeds,  He  too  must  traffic  in  time. 

Is  objective  physical  space  a  thing,  a  quality,  or  a  relation  ?  It 
cannot  be  a  thing  or  substance  since,  if  it  were,  other  things  could 
not  occupy  it,  since  a  thing  is  a  center  of  inertia.  The  physical 
principle  that  two  things  cannot  occupy  the  same  space  simul- 
taneously means  that  whatever  occupies  space  has  inertia  or  mass, 
in  other  words  consists  of  centers  of  force.  But  to  identify  space 
with  mass  or  force  would  be  to  deprive  ourselves  of  any  means  of 
relating  masses.  In  other  words,  if  we  identify  space  with  the 
things  which  occupy  it,  we  have  no  means  left  of  relating  the  things 
with  respect  to  position,  motion,  mass.  Empirical  things  are  com- 
plexes of  sense  qualities;  but  abstract  space  is  neither  a  complex 
of  sense  qualities  nor  a  simple  sense  quality.  It  is  true  that  we 
speak,  in  psychological  analysis,  of  visual  and  kinesthetic  spaces, 
and  of  their  fusion  in  the  genesis  of  space  perception,  but  these  are 
abstractions  which  presuppose  a  common  notion  of  spatiality  or 
extensity.  Obviously  there  is  not  a  single  homogeneous  spatial 
quale  possessed  in  common  by  all  our  extensive  sensations.  If 
space  were  a  complex  of  sense  qualities,  we  should  be  able  to  show 
how  it  is  generated  from  simple  sense  qualities  not  possessing 
extensity  attributes.  As  I  have  said  above,  we  must  distinguish 
between  extensity  and  geometrical  space.  Extensity  is  an  attri- 
bute of  sense  percepts,  which  is  just  as  irreducible  as  color,  sound, 
taste  or  smell,  and  is  more  comprehensive,  since  the  quality  of 
extensity  is  found  with  all  the  other  attributes.  A  sense  percept 
is,  in  Berkeley's  words,  a  congeries  of  sense  qualities ;  and  one  of 
these  qualities,  namely  extensity,  is  always  present.  The  corn- 
presence  of  extensity  with  other  qualities  is,  together  with  its 
relatively  greater  susceptibility  to  precision  of  treatment,  the 
reason  why  science  is  prone  to  attempt  to  account  for  all  other  sense 
qualities  in  terms  of  extensity  factors ;  but,  if  extensity  is  always 
present  with  other  sense  qualities,  it  is  equally  true  that  some  other 


228  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

sense  qualities  are  always  present  with  extensity;  so  the  attempt 
to  explain  all  other  qualities  as  merely  variations  in  extensity  is 
foredoomed  to  failure.  All  sense  qualities  are  equally  real.  If 
one  were  blind  one  could  not  perceive  color,  but  if  one  were  com- 
pletely paralyzed  one  could  not  perceive  extensity  since  kinesthetic 
experience  is  fundamental  in  the  perception  of  space.  Geometrical 
space  results  from  building  up,  out  of  the  concrete  extensities  of 
sense  percepts,  a  system  of  abstract  relations.  Geometrical  space 
exists  only  as  a  mental  abstraction,  but  concrete  extensities  exist 
objectively ;  and  persist,  that  is,  have  duration.  Space  then  must 
be  a  complex  of  relations.  It  is  the  tridimensional  and  reversible 
order  of  relations  between  coexisting  things.  It  is  the  way  in 
which  the  system  of  simultaneously  existing  entities  appear  to  the 
mind.  Positions,  directions  and  distances  are  the  persistent  rela- 
tions between  the  plurality  of  existing  things.  Such  relations  as 
above  and  below,  right  and  left,  east  and  west,  before  and  behind, 
distance  and  magnitude,  imply  the  existence  of  the  objects  thus 
related  in  the  specious  present  or  "now" ;  and  the  continuance  of 
such  relations  presupposes  the  temporal  continuity  of  the  things 
related.  Space  relations  imply  the  permanence  of  objects  in  time 
relations.  On  the  other  hand,  time  relations  involve  space  rela- 
tions, since  the  notion  of  a  "now"  or  specious  present  implies  a 
coexisting  plurality  of  entities.  Space,  then,  is  the  manner  or 
form  in  which  the  reversible  relationships  or  order  of  a  system  of 
simultaneously  existing  force  centers  appears  to  the  finite  self. 
Empirical  or  psychological  space  is  a  relational  complex  built  up 
by  the  correlation  of  visual  and  tactual  extension.  It  is  in  the 
sense  that  the  attribute  of  extensity  belongs  to  these  perceptual 
experiences  and  that  the  mind  can  abstract  and  correlate  the  ex- 
tensity factors  that  space  is  native  to  the  mind.  Mathematical 
space  is  of  empirical  origin,  but  the  data  from  which  it  is  built  up 
belongs  to  the  sense  percepts,  and  the  modes  of  operation  by  which 
it  is  built  up  belong  to  the  mind.    Similarly  with  time. 

There  is  nothing  in  the  origin  and  use  of  our  space  ideas  to 
justify  the  assumption  of  a  self-existing  entity  called  space.  We  do 
not  need  it  for  any  practical  or  scientific  purpose  and  it  is  certainly 
a  stumbling  block  in  the  way  of  metaphysical  synthesis. 

I  do  not  mean,  by  saying  that  space  and  time  are  relative,  that 
we  can  deduce  them  from  nonspatial  and  nontemporal  relations. 
As  Dr.  Alexander  well  says,  "Relations  in  Space  and  Time  are 


SPACE  AND  TIME  229 

themselves  Spaces  and  Times."  16    I  would  prefer  to  say  that  they 
are  spatial  and  temporal  relations. 

Matter  is  not  in  space,  as  though  these  were  two  distinct 
entities.  Whatever  is  material  is  spatial  and  vice  versa.  There 
can  be  no  empty  space.  Matter  is  space,  but  it  is  never  mere  space, 
since  the  concrete  extensities  which  are  material  endure,  move  and 
change.  Thus  matter  is  spatial-temporal.  If  there  are  immaterial 
entities  which  are  not  in  space  (as  Lotze  contends  in  regard  to 
thought)  then  they  have  protensive  but  not  extensive  qualities-in- 
relation. 

Real  space  then  is  the  order  of  coexistence  or  empirical  simul- 
taneity among  bodies  or  event-particles  and  systems  of  event-par- 
ticles. Whenever  there  are  bodies  there  are  space  relations. 
Physical  space  and  time  are  no  more  and  no  less  real  than  bodies, 
which  are  systems  of  moving  particles  or  event-particles. 

Dr.  Alexander  argues  that  if  time  were  nothing  more  than  bare 
time  it  would  consist  of  perishing  instants.  The  mere  temporality 
of  time  leaves  no  place  for  its  continuity.  Space  saves  time  from 
being  a  mere  now.  In  order  that  time  should  linger  space  must 
recur,  a  point  must  be  repeated  in  more  than  one  instant.17 

Conversely,  in  order  that  space  may  have  distinction  of  parts, 
may  be  more  than  a  mere  blank,  there  must  be  time.  Space  is 
generated  by  time.  It  is  the  trail  of  time,  the  "body"  of  which 
time  is  the  "soul."  By  itself  each  consists  of  elements  or  parts 
which  are  indistinguishable  so  long  as  the  elements  of  the  other 
are  excluded.18  I  understand  this  to  be  his  way  of  saying  that, 
whereas  we  can  construct  timeless  spaces  for  various  time  systems, 
and  can  have  as  many  time  systems  as  there  are  configurations  of 
movement  and  as  many  space  and  time  measurements  as  there  are 
systems  of  reference,  the  latter  are  all  finite  sections  of  the  one 
whole  of  space-time,  the  one  dynamic  or  moving  configuration  of 
reality.  I  would  say  that  all  finite  time  systems  and  space  orders 
are  perspectives  of  the  one  cosmic  order,  which  is  spatio-dynamic, 
or,  if  you  like,  is  body-soul.  The  enduring  character  of  the  cosmic 
order  is  time  and  eternity. 

In  the  one  cosmical  order  there  is  no  timeless  space,  no  pure 
instantaneity,  and  no  spaceless  time  or  ghostly  duration. 


M  Space,  Time  and  Deity,  pp.  165,  166. 
■ Ibid.,  pp.  45-49. 
™Ibid.,  pp.  60,  61,  etc. 


230  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

Where  I  quarrel  with  Dr.  Alexander  is  with  respect  to  his 
notion  that  space-time  is  an  adequate  description  of  the  whole.  It 
seems  to  me  that  to  speak  of  the  whole  order  of  the  universe  as 
space-time  is,  either  to  empty  reality  of  everything  but  its  thinnest, 
most  vacuous  and  formal  aspects,  or  else  it  is  to  import  into  the 
concept  of  space-time  all  the  empirical  and  transempirical  bits  of 
sensed  qualities,  life,  mind  and  the  works  of  mind.  If  Dr.  Alex- 
ander means  to  load  his  space-time  whole  with  all  these  qualities, 
then  it  is  rich  enough  to  stand  for  reality  as  a  whole  but  it  is  a 
very  unusual  use  of  terms. 

One  can  conceive  that  truth  and  other  values,  such  as  affec- 
tional  and  some  aesthetic  values,  for  example  those  of  music,  are 
not  spatially  conditioned.  But  I,  for  one,  find  it  impossible  to 
conceive  a  purely  nonspatial  existence.  I  can  conceive,  although 
very  vaguely,  a  mind  which  is  not  externally  bounded  and  limited 
by  space,  which  grasps  as  a  totality  what  are  for  us  finite  minds 
the  indefiniteness  or  boundlessness  of  space  relations  in  one  intui- 
tive insight;  but  such  a  mind  would  be  trans-spatial,  not  non- 
spatial.  Thus  an  over-self  might  transcend  our  spatial  order,  by 
grasping  as  one  individual  totality  the  existence  of  the  whole  in 
which  we  are  limited  elements.  The  increasing  power  of  the 
human  mind  to  master  and  pervade  space  relations  does  give  us 
some  positive  hint  of  the  possible  character  of  such  a  space-pene- 
trating perfect  self. 

Time  is  not  a  thing,  nor  a  single  sensory  quality.  It  is  a 
relational  order  of  all  our  experiences.  Time  is  the  way  or  form 
in  which  the  continuous  succession  of  events  or  durations  appears 
to  the  finite  self.  It  is  the  irreversible  series  or  order  of  events. 
Time  is  not  a  single  sensory  quality,  since  we  cannot  separate  it 
from  or  range  it  alongside  of  or  fuse  it  with  other  sensory  quali- 
ties. That  sensory  and  affectional  qualities  of  experience  change 
in  time,  means  that  they  are  in  a  definite  order.  To  say  that 
events  happen  in  time  is  simply  to  say  that  they  occur  in  an 
irreversible  serial  order.  Temporal  order  cannot  be  generated 
from  any  combination  of  nontemporal  entities.  The  notion  of 
temporal  order  is  derived  from  the  self's  recognition  of  the  suc- 
cession of  its  own  discrete  experiences  or  interpenetrating  dura- 
tions. "Always  to  perceive  the  same  thing  and  not  to  perceive 
are  the  same  thing,"  said  Hobbes.  Always  to  perceive  the  same 
thing,  if  it  were  possible,  would  certainly  mean  not  to  have  any 


SPACE  AND  TIME  231 

sense  of  temporal  succession.  On  the  other  hand,  in  order  to 
recognize  the  discrete  succession  of  events  as  a  succession,  the  self 
must  be  conscious  of  its  own  continuity  through  change.  The 
notion  of  the  irreversible  order  of  temporal  events,  then,  is  a 
direct  derivative  of  the  self's  awareness  of  its  own  living  con- 
tinuity through  change.  The  recognition  of  an  objective  time 
order  is  due  to  the  self's  recognition  that  it  is  a  self  only  as  a 
member  of  human  society  and  of  the  universe. 

Since  a  self  has  his  own  private  experiences  of  succession  and 
duration,  his  own  psychical  tempo  which  he  projects  backwards 
and  forwards  from  the  specious  present  or  "now,"  his  "now" 
contains,  in  its  memories  of  the  past  and  its  expectations  of  the 
future,  the  experiential  basis  for  all  individual  estimates  of  time 
and  duration.  But,  just  as  the  individual  would  never  be  able 
to  distinguish  and  apprehend  his  own  position  in  space  without 
reference  to  the  simultaneous  positions  of  other  beings,  so  he  would 
never  be  able  to  apprehend  his  own  present,  past,  and  future 
without  reference  to  the  presents,  pasts,  and  futures  of  other 
beings.  In  the  present  moment  the  individual  can  transcend  the 
present  moment.  In  so  far  as  he  identifies  himself  in  thought 
with  a  telluric  or  cosmic  social  order,  he  transcends  the  temporal 
limitations  of  his  own  life,  entertains  the  notion  of  an  all-em- 
bracing temporal  order;  but  he  does  not  thus  become  timeless. 
He  can  think  truths  and  other  values  that  are  free  from  temporal 
limitations,  but  he  cannot  conceive  a  real  existence  that  has  no 
positive  relation  to  the  temporal  order.  A  cosmic  self  might  not 
be  limited  by  time.  Time  could  be  in  him,  not  he  in  time.  He 
might  hold  the  endless  temporal  order  together  in  one  continuous 
insight,  as  we  hold  fragments  of  our  duration  together  in  memory. 
Thus  time  to  him  would  not  be  endless  in  the  sense  of  stretching 
indefinitely  and  unknowably  behind  and  before  him.  Since  he 
would  be  the  unceasingly  active  and  unchanging  ground  of  the 
world  order,  the  cosmic  temporal  order  would  be  the  form  of  his 
ceaseless  energizing.  The  past  of  the  whole  universe  would  exist 
for  him  and  in  him  as  a  function  of  his  immediately  present  self- 
activity.  The  future  of  the  whole  universe  would  exist  for  him 
and  in  him,  inasmuch  as  he  would  be  the  ground  of  the  whole 
system  of  real  possibilities  open  to  the  finite  members  of  his  uni- 
verse.19 

"See  further  Chap.  37:   "Perfection  and  Evolution." 


232  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

Dr.  Whitehead  criticizes  the  conception  of  a  material  which  is 
in  space  and  in  time,  on  the  ground  that  if  space  and  time  are 
entities  independent  of  material  then  space-time  relations  cannot 
be  attributes  of  matter.  In  short,  if  matter  and  space-time  are  in- 
dependent of  one  another,  then  the  physical  order  cannot  be  de- 
scribed in  terms  of  the  spatial  and  temporal  relations  of  matter. 
The  criticism  is  valid  against  the  notion  that  matter  and  space- 
time  are  independent  entities.  But  the  minimum  meaning  of 
matter  is  just  that  it  occupies  space  and  changes  its  contours  or 
form  qualities  and  its  other  qualities  in  space.  Physical  space  is 
just  the  order  of  the  simultaneous  contours  of  matter.  Conceive 
the  systematic  relations  of  material  particles  as  instantaneous  and 
you  have  timeless  space.  Physical  time  is  just  the  order  of  change 
in  the  contours  and  the  qualities  of  matter.  Thus  matter  and 
physical  space  and  time  are  not  independent  entities.  Matter  is 
spatial  because  space  is  material  and  time  is  physical  because 
matter  changes.  Matter  is  but  a  name  for  the  permanent  quali- 
ties and  relations  of  dynamic  and  coexisting  beings  and  time  is 
but  a  name  for  the  duration  and  succession  of  their  activities. 

The  problems  of  the  infinite  divisibility  and  extensibility  of 
space  and  time  result  from  taking  the  formal  orders  of  coexistence 
and  succession  as  objectively  continuous  entities.  If  what  really 
exists  now,  or  at  any  other  moment,  be  a  definite  assemblage  of 
individua,  the  complex  spatial  relations  between  these  would  be 
resoluble,  if  one  had  sufficient  sweep  and  penetrative  power  of 
analysis,  into  simple  or  immediate  relations ;  and  since  there  must 
be  a  finite  number  of  individua,  there  must  be  a  finite  number 
of  relations.  A  cosmic  self  would  not  need  to  count  these  rela- 
tions ;  for,  by  hypothesis,  he  would  be  the  absolute  ground  of  the 
determinate  system  or  order  of  the  relationships  between  the  de- 
terminately  existing  number  of  individual  beings.  Space  is  finite, 
since  it  is  but  a  system  of  relations  between  the  actual  number 
of  existing  finite  beings.  A  human  being  cannot  help  imagining 
a  finite  cosmos  as  bounded  by  empty  space,  since  he  cannot  depict 
the  whole  system  of  coexisting  finite  beings  except  as  bounded. 
He  cannot  do  otherwise  since  he  cannot  intuitively  grasp  at  one 
blow  the  whole  system;  he  is  a  finite  member  and  therefore  can 
have  only  an  incomplete  although  progressing  grasp  of  his  rela- 
tions to  the  other  finite  members  of  the  world  system.  For  a 
cosmic  experient,  on  the  other  hand,  the  whole  system  in  $11  its 


SPACE  AND  TIME  233 

details  and  relations  might  be  continuously  present  in  one  space- 
transcending  insight.  Similarly,  the  succession  of  events  must 
be  a  determinate  order.  The  immediate  ground  of  this  determi- 
nate order  of  events  must  be  the  interactions  and  interpassions  of 
the  individual  members  of  the  world  order.  The  ultimate  ground 
must  be  the  world  order  itself.  The  infinitude  or  endlessness  of 
this  world  order  would  be  simply  the  eternal  creating  and  con- 
serving self-activity  of  the  world  ground.  The  finite  individual 
is  conditioned  by  the  cosmic  temporal  order  and  the  cosmic  spatial 
order,  which  are  to  him  boundless  and  endless  respectively,  since 
he  is  a  finite  member  of  the  cosmic  order.  Thus  the  eternal 
world  ground  would  not  be  conditioned  by  the  temporal  order. 
He  would  transcend  time,  in  the  sense  that  the  endless  succession 
of  durations  in  the  finite  members  of  the  world  order  would 
continuously  depend  on  his  sustaining  activity.20 

What  are  the  relations  of  the  indefinite  multitude  of  individual 
space  perceptions  and  time  perceptions  to  the  cosmical  space  and 
time  orders  ?  The  former  must  be  series  of  perspectives  or  points 
of  view,  taken  throughout  the  histories  of  percipients,  of  the  one 
objective  or  cosmical  order  of  coexistent  relationships  among  finite 
existents  and  of  the  one  cosmical  order  of  succession  in  the  his- 
tories of  finite  existents.  My  perception  of  space  relations,  here 
and  now,  must  be  a  fragmentary,  and,  therefore,  but  partially  true, 
perspective  of  the  real  existence  now  of  things  in  their  totality. 
I  enlarge  and  improve  this  perspective,  by  taking  account  of  more 
comprehensive  social  and  physical  relationships,  but  my  spatial 
perspectives  must  always  remain  fragmentary.  Individually  and 
socially  these  perspectives  are  good  so  far  as  they  go,  but  they 
must  always  remain  imperfect.  As  social  beings,  the  most  that 
we  can  do  is  to  attain  more  comprehensive  and  harmonious  series 
of  agreeing  but  fragmentary  perspectives  of  the  total  system  of 
reality.  Similarly,  we  can  enlarge  and  render  more  consistent 
our  temporal  perspectives.  Thus,  our  individual  perspectives  of 
time  and  duration,  enlarged  and  harmonized  through  social  co- 
operation and  communion,  become  relatively  less  inadequate  com- 
mon perspectives  of  the  one  cosmic  temporal  order ;  but  as  to  how 
far  the  widest  sweep  of  our  historical  and  evolutionary  perspec- 
tives are  valid  views  of  the  cosmical  temporal  order,  we  may  never 

20  See  further,  Chap.  ?* 


234  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

know.  The  individual's  space  and  time  perspectives,  as  corrected 
and  enlarged  through  social  communion,  attain  higher  degrees  of 
truth.  But  in  this  matter,  as  in  all  matters  that  deal  with  ultimate 
problems,  we  must  remain  content  with  approximations  by  slow 
degrees  to  an  ultimate  truth  which  in  its  concreteness  and  totality 
remains  always  beyond  our  grasp. 

Conceptual  or  mathematical  space  and  time  are,  as  we  have 
seen,  the  results  of  social  thinking,  of  the  cooperative  efforts  of 
the  human  mind  to  approximate  more  closely  to  the  objective 
order.  The  histories  of  these  concepts  shows  that  clearly.  The 
greater  the  degree  of  precision  that  we  can  introduce  into  our 
physical  standards  of  time  measurement,  the  closer  will  be  the 
approximation  of  our  conception  to  the  presupposed  objective 
cosmical  order;  but  the  degree  of  such  approximation  is  always 
limited  by  the  condition  that  we  must  depend  upon  the  data  of 
our  sense  organs  and  the  relativity  of  our  systems  of  reference  for 
the  materials  of  our  judgment.  By  the  use  of  mathematical 
methods  we  may  approximate  more  closely  to  the  objective  order. 
From  empirical  space  and  time  perceptions  we  form,  by  social 
cooperation  and  by  intellectual  construction,  more  nearly  invari- 
ant standards  of  measurement.  As  Poincare  says:  "We  seek 
the  invariant  laws  which  are  the  relations  between  the  crude  facts 
of  nature."  The  possibility  of  translating  things  from  one  space 
order  into  another  implies  the  existence  of  an  invariant  order; 
similarly  with  time.  Moreover  since,  as  we  have  seen,  the  recog- 
nition of  a  spatial  order  presupposes  the  recognition  of  a  temporal 
order,  the  presupposition  of  our  quests  for  more  accurate  spatial 
and  temporal  determinations  is  an  absolute  invariant  order,  an 
eternal  order  as  the  basis  of  the  objective  or  cosmical  temporal 
order.  The  conception  of  an  objective  and  uniform  order  of 
temporal  sequence  is  the  consequence  of  comparing  a  num- 
ber of  ordered  series  of  changes  with  one  another  and  of  es- 
tablishing a  one-one  correspondence  between  them.  For  example, 
I  find  a  one-one  correspondence  between  the  acts  of  my  daily 
routine  and  clock  time,  and  between  clock  time  and  sidereal  time. 
As  Natorp  remarks:21  "The  possibility  of  objective  temporal  de- 
termination depends  upon  uniformity  and  continuity  in  change 
and  the  objective  temporal  sequence  of  events  is  a  logical  construc- 

21  Die  logischen  Grundlagen  der  exakten  Wissenschaften,  p.  345. 


SPACE  AND  TIME  235 

tion  of  events  in  one  temporal  order."  But  the  one  temporal 
order  is  the  eternal  order,  which  our  empirical  time  determina- 
tions presuppose — an  absolute  and  eternal  order.22 

Every  attempt  to  solve  the  space-time  problem  by  separating 
empirical  space-time,  dubbed  "subjective,"  from  physical  space- 
time,  dubbed  "objective"  and  conceived  as  an  abstract  order  or  set 
of  mathematical  laws,  breaks  down.  Every  empirical  space-time 
is  a  fragment  of  the  ultimate  space-time  order  seen  in  perspective 
from  the  view-point  of  a  finite  percipient.  All  the  empirical 
space-time  facts  are  real;  they  are  fragmentary  and  momentary 
views  of  the  one  ultimate  order — the  Order  of  the  Universe — 
which  is  not  space  and  time  added  together  but  one  systematic 
totality,  one  dynamic  and  continuous  system.  Extensity  and 
Duration  are  aspects  of  the  One  Order  which  are  distinguishable 
in  thought  but  inseparable  in  fact  and  reality.  The  universe  is 
an  order  manifested  as  Space-time,  but  it  is  very  much  more;  it 
is  a  living  super-organism  or  community,  of  which  Extensity  and 
Duration  are  but  poor  and  formal  aspects. 

APPENDIX 

dr.  Alexander's  theory  of  space-time 

I  cannot  undertake  here  a  full  critical  consideration  of  Dr.  Samuel 
Alexander's  fascinating  theory  of  space-time  as  the  absolute  or  ulti- 
mate of  ultimates  in  his  massive  and  stimulating  work :  Space  Time 
and  Deity.  I  must  be  content  to  set  my  own  view  in  relation  to  his 
by  a  few  critical  remarks.  Dr.  Alexander  conceives  space-time,  or 
the  endless  motion  of  extended  substances  or  materiality,  as  the  all- 
inclusive  reality.  For  him,  time  is  the  "soul"  or  moving  principle 
of  space  and  space  is  the  "body"  of  time.  Thus  the  fundamental 
reality  consists  of  ever-changing  spatial  contours.  Within  this  all- 
inclusive  and  ever-moving  extensive  reality  there  emerge,  by  compli- 
cation, a  series  of  ascending  orders  of  empirical  qualities:  first,  the 
secondary  qualities  of  our  empirical  order,  such  as  color,  sound,  tem- 
perature, taste  and  odor;  second,  by  further  complication,  the  vital 


22  In  addition  to  the  references  already  given,  the  following  are  especially 
important:  Koyce's  discussion  in  The  World  and  Individual,  Vol.  II:  the 
writings  of  Charles  Kenouvier;  a  valuable  discussion  will  be  found  in  A.  O. 
Lovejoy's  articles:  "The  Problem  of  Time  in  Eecent  French  Philosophy," 
Philosophical  Review  1917,  Vol.  xxi;  and  "The  Place  of  the  Time  Problem 
in  Contemporary  Philosophy,"  Journal  of  Philosophy,  Psychology,  and  Scien- 
tific Methods,  1910,  Vol.  vii. 


236  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

qualities  or  behavior  of  living  matter;  third,  by  a  further  complica- 
tion of  vital  behavior,  the  qualities  of  sentience  or  feeling  and  cona- 
tion. (Thought  or  cognition  for  Dr.  Alexander  is  delayed  or  sus- 
pended conation.)  Values,  in  his  system,  are  not  empirical  qualities 
but  products  of  feeling  and  conation  in  interaction  with  their  physical 
medium.  It  is  a  fair  presumption,  says  Alexander,  that,  just  as 
secondary  qualities  have  emerged  from  primary,  vital  from  secondary 
and  sentient  or  mental  from  vital,  by  complication,  so  higher  em- 
pirical qualities  than  mind  are  emerging  in  the  endless  movement  of 
space-time.  The  divinity  of  the  universe  or  God  in  the  making,  the 
God  that  always  is  to  be  but  never  is,  is  the  emergence  of  empirical 
qualities  higher  than  mind.  We  cannot  know  what  these  are,  since 
we  are  only  finite  minds,  but  we  may  infer  that  finite  mind  is  the 
"body"  of  which  God,  or  the  complex  of  higher  qualities  in  becoming, 
is  the  "soul,"  just  as  finite  mind  is  the  soul  which  emerges  from 
organic  bodies  and  as  life  is  the  soul  which  emerges  from  a  specific 
complication  of  secondary  physical  qualities.  I  shall  not  here  discuss 
the  question  whether  it  is  not  a  radical  confusion  of  counsel  to  call 
Deity  the  supermental  qualities  which  may  be  emerging  from  a 
complication  of  finite  minds  but  never  fully  emerge;  in  other  words, 
whether  a  God  that  never  is  but  is  always  becoming  or  to  be  is 
properly  called  God  or  Deity. 

Doctor  Alexander  seems  to  me  to  have  shown  that  in  reality  the 
space-time  aspects  of  the  empirical  world  are  inseparable.  With 
respect  to  the  physical  world  his  saying  that  time  is  the  soul  of 
which  space  is  the  body  is  a  figurative  expression  of  a  profound  truth. 
I  do  not  think  that  he  succeeds  in  his  attempt  to  demonstrate  that 
space  without  time  would  have  only  one  dimension;  although  I  do 
hold  that  the  recognition  of  two  or  more  dimensions  involves  a 
temporal  element  and  thus  extensity  and  time  are  tied  up  together. 
Where  I  fail  completely  to  follow  Dr.  Alexander  is  in  his  attempted 
deduction  of  the  various  orders  of  empirical  qualities  from  pure 
space-time.  I  cannot  understand  how,  by  any  conjuring  trick  of  the 
mind,  secondary  qualities  can  be  shown  to  "emerge"  from  mere  space- 
time  or  vital  and  sentient  qualities  from  secondary  physical  qualities. 
Dr.  Alexander  denies  that  his  system  is  a  materialism  since,  in  the 
cardinal  instances  of  life  and  mind,  these  qualities  are  not  caused 
by  their  primary  and  secondary  substrata  but  emerge  by  "complica- 
tion." Life,  in  his  terminology,  is  the  "enjoyment,"  in  a  new  simpli- 
fication, of  a  complex  of  secondary  qualities;  mind  is  the  enjoyment 
of  that  specific  complex  of  vital  qualities  which  constitutes  innerva- 
tion, the  basis  of  consciousness.  This  attempt  to  distinguish  between 
emergence  and  causation  and  to  argue  that,  since  life  is  the  enjoy- 


SPACE  AND  TIME  237 

ment  by  color,  sound,  et  cetera,  of  itself,  therefore  life  is  not  the 
caused  product  of  material  motions;  and,  because  mind  is  the  enjoy- 
ment by  itself  of  an  innervation  complex,  therefore  mind  is  not  the 
caused  product  of  innervation,  seems  to  me  a  verbal  quibble.  If  life 
emerges  from  a  physical  order  in  which  there  was  no  life,  and  mind 
from  that  particular  complication  of  the  physical  order  which  is 
vitality,  then  we  have  a  new  materialism.  In  view  of  the  historical 
meaning  of  terms  why  cheat  ourselves  with  words?  In  spite  of  his 
protestations,  Dr.  Alexander's  imposing  and  ingenious  attempt  to 
deduce  all  the  empirical  qualities  in  existence  from  pure  space-time 
is  materialism.  Now,  if  materialism  be  the  most  cogent  philosophy, 
in  other  words  the  philosophy  which  on  empirical  and  rational 
grounds  carries  the  heaviest  weight  of  evidence  to  our  minds,  we 
ought  to  accept  it.  To  say  why  it  does  not  carry  this  overweight 
to  me  would  be  to  attempt  to  condense  the  whole  course  of  the  pres- 
ent work.  In  the  interests  of  brevity  I  must  be  content  to  say  here 
that  space-time  are  two  correlative  aspects  of  reality.  But  reality  is 
not  now  and  never  was  pure  space-time.  Higher  orders  of  empirical 
existence  and  value  are  not  deducible  from  pure  space-time.  Space- 
time  is  too  abstract,  too  thin,  too  mechanical  in  the  geometrical  sense, 
to  constitute  the  stuff  of  reality,  a  primal  motion-stuff  in  which  emerge, 
by  its  thickening-up,  all  the  higher  orders  of  existence.  Dr.  Alex- 
ander's space-time,  regarded  as  the  primal  motion-stuff,  seems  to  me 
strangely  like  the  fire  of  old  Heraclitus  and  the  fine  fiery  essence 
of  the  Stoics.  Alexander's  space-time  is  a  materialistic  absolute 
stated  in  terms  of  modern  kinematics.  If  mind  and  life  emerge  by 
a  process  of  blind  complication  from  a  physical  or  kinematical  world 
in  which  mind  and  life  were  not  already  operative,  then  mind  and 
life  are  by-products  of  matter  in  motion  and  the  latter  has  the 
strange  property  of  condensing  or  concentrating  itself  into  forms  of 
existence  which  do  not  obey  or  even  respect  their  parent,  since  they 
do  not  obviously  behave  according  to  the  principles  of  kinematics  and 
physical  dynamics.  The  issue  seems  to  me  clear-cut  between  Dr. 
Alexander's  theory  and  any  theory  which  would  be  adequate  to  all 
the  facts.  Life  and  mind  are  efficient  factors  in  the  universe,  and 
factors  whose  modes  of  behavior  are  not  charted  in  kinematics.  If 
it  is  asserted  that  life  and  mind  have  been  produced  from  space-time, 
what  we  have  served  up,  in  the  interests  of  a  specious  continuity  of 
doctrine  garbed  in  quasi-mathematical  phrase,  is  the  assertion  that 
an  abstract  universe  of  moving  extensity  has  given  birth  to  a  hier- 
archical series  of  concrete  realities  whose  significant  qualities  and 
increasing  values  are  entirely  other  than  moving  extensities. 


CHAPTER  XIX 


PHYSICAL    REALITY 


I  shall  use  the  term  "primary  physical  reality"  to  designate 
all  data  of  sense.  These  data,  of  course,  actually  exist  for  selves 
only  in  the  moment  of  experience.  In  the  absence  of  any  percipi- 
ent these  data  exist  in  the  form  of  possible  objects  of  perception. 

I  assume  that  our  minds  are  in  our  bodies.1  The  human  body 
I  assume  to  be  the  medium  of  communication  between  the  mind 
and  the  remainder  of  physical  reality.  In  the  broadest  sense  of 
the  term  I  mean  by  "physical  reality"  or  "nature"  all  that  is  either 
experienced,  experienceable,  or  conceived  as  logically  implicated  in 
experience,  by  other  minds  as  well  as  by  one's  own  mind.  Thus, 
'physical  reality  is  a  social  reality.  Its  very  recognition  as  a  public 
reality  implies  the  recognition  of  the  existence  of  other  selves. 
And  in  turn  the  recognition  of  other  selves  implies  the  existence 
of  a  public  realm  of  sense  perceivables  or  "sensibilia,"  inasmuch 
as  one  can  know  another  self  only  through  physical  intercommuni- 
cation. If  there  were  only  one  self  in  the  universe,  for  him  there 
would  be  no  distinction  between  mental  or  subjective  and  physical 
or  objective  reality.2  Mental  or  subjective  reality,  by  contrast, 
includes  everything  that  is  not  an  actual  or  possible  public  sensory 
datum;  namely  all  personal  feelings,  private  attitudes  and  acts. 
Of  course,  we  infer  from  their  physical  expressions  the  feelings, 
attitudes,  and  acts  of  other  persons ;  but  we  do  not  contemplate  the 
latter  in  themselves.    You  and  I  see  the  same  chair  from  slichtlv 

1  On  the  relation  of  mind  and  body,  see  Book  iv,  Chap.  27. 

2  If  I  were  the  only  self  in  my  physical  universe,  there  being  no  distinc- 
tion between  mine  and  any  other  universe,  I  could  only  conclude,  when  my 
expectations  were  disappointed  and  my  purposes  had  gone  awry,  that  reality 
had  changed  its  character,  and  not  that  I  had  misconceived  that  character. 
The  world  of  illusions  in  which  the  insane  person  lives  is  due  to  the  derange- 
ment of  the  social  relations  of  the  insane  ego.  The  insane  ego,  because  of 
his  fixed  ideas  or  obsessions,  fails  to  apprehend  the  qualities  and  relations  of 
things  and  persons  that  the  normal  ego  apprehends.  The  genius,  on  the  con- 
trary, is  one  who  sees  deeper  and  farther  into  the  qualities  and  relations  of 
social  experience  than  does  the  average  person. 

238 


PHYSICAL  REALITY  239 

different  angles,  but  we  do  not  see  at  all  one  another's  personal 
feelings  and  inner  attitudes.  In  the  case  of  universals,  such  as 
logical  and  mathematical  relationships,  natural  laws,  types  of 
order,  and  values  and  ends  when  these  are  considered  to  be  ob- 
jective realities,  we  have  to  do  with  entities  which  are  common  to 
the  mental  and  the  physical  realms ;  and  this  community  implies 
that  the  mental  and  the  physical  realms  are  somehow  organic  to 
one  another,  that  they  are  the  twofold  and  interrelated  aspects 
of  one  order.  The  validity  or  trueness  of  universals  and  values 
means  that  they  are  constitutive  principles  of  reality  as  a  whole. 
They  are  discovered  and  formulated  gradually  and  imperfectly 
by  finite  minds;  but  the  latter,  in  this  process  of  discovery  and 
formulation,  are  finding  and  obeying,  and  thus  developing  into 
harmony  with,  the  objective  constitution  of  reality. 

The  nonmental  conditions  of  sense  data  are  brain  and  sense 
organs  and  qualitatively  diverse  energies  operating  in  the  public 
world  of  space  time,  such  as :  undulation  of  air  particles,  motions 
of  physical  particles,  chemical  transformations,  molecular  and 
intra-atomic  or  electronic  energies,  possible  vibrations  of  the  all- 
pervading  ether,  etc.  Why  not  say  that  the  latter  are  the  primary 
and  fundamental  physical  realities,  whereas  the  sensory  data  are 
secondary  or  derivative?  Does  not  Berkeleyan  idealism  rest  on 
the  confusion  between  sensory  data  and  physical  realities,  between 
perceptions  and  stimuli  ?  Mr.  Bertrand  Russell  proposes  that  we 
shall  define  physical  realities  as  the  not-perceived  entities  which 
obey  the  laws  of  physics  and  our  sensory  data  as  series  of  aspects 
or  perspectives  of  these  realities.3  For  example,  the  rim  of  my 
teacup  has  an  indefinite  series  of  shapes,  from  circular  through 
a  variety  of  shapes,  according  to  the  respective  spatial  relations 
of  myself  and  the  cup.  What  I  mean  by  saying  that  the  cup's 
rim  is  really  circular  is,  that  is  the  shape  it  has  in  the  position 
which  is  practically  most  important  for  me,  namely,  within  easy 
reach  of  my  hands.  Common  sense  means  by  real  size,  real  shape 
or  other  real  sense  qualities,  those  sensory  appearances  which  are 
most  relevant  to  our  most  constant  practical  purposes.  Logically 
the  flattest  oval  or  ellipsoid  shape  in  which  the  cup's  rim  appears, 
as  when  we  stand  it  on  the  edge  of  the  rim,  is  just  as  real  as  the 
circular  shape  it  has  in  my  hands.     The  visual  shape  of  a  stick 

*Cf.  B.  Eussell,  Our  Knowledge  of  the  External  World,  Chaps.  3  and  4. 


240  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

which  is  partly  under  water  is  really  bent.  But  the  tactual  shape 
is  straight  and  the  visual  stick  when  out  of  the  water  corresponds 
with  the  tactual  shape  in  or  out  of  the  water,  and  this  correspond- 
ence is  for  practical  purposes  the  most  important  aspect  of  the 
whole  indefinite  series  of  aspects  which  the  thing  may  present ;  so 
we  call  it  the  real  stick.  There  are  mathematical  and  physical 
laws  by  which  we  sum  up  in  formulae  the  relations  between  whole 
series  of  varying  sense  data  such  as  the  cup's  series  of  shapes. 
Why  not  say  then  that  the  real  physical  object  is  the  conceived 
entity  that  obeys  these  laws  ? 

The  question  at  issue  here  is  chiefly  a  matter  of  terminology. 
In  order  to  avoid  the  errors  of  subjectivism  or  mentalism  it  seems 
best  to  say  that  the  sensory  appearances  are  the  primary  realities; 
and  that  the  reality  of  sense  data,  as  due  to  the  organic  interde- 
pendence of  the  mind  and  physical  things,  involves  the  construc- 
tion, starting  from  sense  perception,  of  a  doctrine  as  to  what  kinds 
of  entities  logically  must  exist  in  nature  independent  of  sense 
perception — in  other  words  a  realistic  theory  of  nature.  I  pro- 
ceed to  outline  my  own  theory. 

When  we  undertake  to  account  for  one  sense  datum  or  a  series 
of  sense  data,  we  have  to  assume  an  interacting  system  of  things 
in  motion  which  give  rise  to  the  sensory  data — undulating  par- 
ticles, molecular,  atomic  or  intra-atomic  centers  of  attraction  and 
repulsion,  etc.  These  we  may  call,  to  use  Mr.  C.  D.  Broad's  happy 
phrase,  the  microscopic  mechanisms.  These  microscopic  or  rather 
ultra-microscopic  mechanisms  are  pulverized  or  comminuted 
macroscopic  mechanisms.  In  other  words,  they  are  conceived  by 
taking  the  most  simple  and  manageable  sense  qualities ;  extension, 
figure,  motion,  mass,  and  reducing  them  to  ever  minuter  propor- 
tions. They  remain  objects  of  possible  perception.  If  our  powers 
of  sensory  discrimination  were  fine  enough  they  might  be  per- 
ceived. With  an  ultra-microscope  we  might  see  electrons.  Actual 
sensory  things  are  complexes  of  sensed  qualities  existing  in  spatial 
relations.  The  shape  and  color  of  a  rose,  for  instance,  are  spa- 
tially coterminous.  The  place  of  one  thing  excludes  another  in 
so  far  as  the  thing  is  real,  that  is,  has  inertia  or  mass.  Thus 
space-occupancy  and  circulation  or  movement  through  space  are 
the  most  fundamental  characteristics  of  physical  things,  their 
most  constant  qualities.  By  "space-occupancy"  I  mean  inertia  or 
mass  and  this  implies  force.     Thus  the  ultimate  things  of  physics 


PHYSICAL  REALITY  241 

are  space-occupying  centers  of  force  or  inertia,  since  force  is  the 
power  to  do  work  and  work  consists  either  in  moving  something 
against  an  obstacle  or  in  resisting  movement.  A  physical  thing 
is  a  power  to  move  against  another,  and  a  power  to  resist  move- 
ment by  another.  This  most  stubborn  quality  of  bodies  is  re- 
garded as  its  primary  reality,  but  logically  it  is  no  more  primary 
than  figure,  color,  or  "feel."  The  ultimate  thing,  so-called,  of 
physics  is  thus  a  conceptual  construct  projected  behind  the  sen- 
sory things  and  events  in  order  to  explain  the  changes  in  the  latter. 
In  short,  the  things  and  processes  of  physical  theory — molecules, 
atoms,  sub-atoms  or  electrons,  undulation,  rotation,  etc. — are  ab- 
stract entities  denuded  of  those  sensory  qualities  which  do  not 
lend  themselves  readily  to  mathematical  treatment,  and  which 
cannot  be  made  very  small  without  seeming  to  disappear ;  such  as 
color,  sound,  taste,  odor.  The  "things"  of  physics  are  constructed 
from  those  empirical  qualities  which  have  relatively  greatest  con- 
stancy, and  therefore  are  most  readily  susceptible  of  being  made 
into  mechanical  models  and  having  their  behaviors  formulated  in 
mathematical  terms.  The  laws  of  physical  relationship  are  eco- 
nomic or  shorthand  generalizations  in  regard  to  the  most  uniform, 
simple,  and  calculable  aspects  of  sensory  data — those  aspects  which 
can  be  most  easily  manipulated  in  mechanical  models.  As  thus 
conceived  and  manipulated,  they  cannot  really  exist  and  they  do 
not  explain  the  qualitative  variety  of  empirical  objects.  Since 
the  percipient,  and  also  the  secondary  qualities  of  the  objects  per- 
ceived, are  not  amenable  to  mathematical  and  mechanical  treat- 
ment they  are  dropped  from  the  reckoning. 

Thus  the  distinction  between  primary  and  secondary  qualities, 
as  being  respectively  objective  and  subjective,  is  invalid ;  however 
convenient  it  may  be  for  the  physicist.  It  is  convenient  for  his 
purposes,  since  the  space-mass-time-motion  aspects  of  sense  data 
are  those  most  easily  manipulated  in  mechanical  and  mathematical 
terms;  but  colors,  tastes,  sounds,  and  odors  are,  experientmlly ', 
just  as  real  as  shapes,  movements  and  masses.  All  the  sensory 
qualities  are  real,  since  they  belong  to  a  world  which  consists 
of  sensory  and  mental  systems  and  of  other  systems  in  organic 
interdependence. 

The  attempt  made  in  "energetic"  philosophies  of  nature  to 
reduce  the  physical  world  to  a  constellation  of  dimensionless  punc- 
tiform  centers  of  force  or  energy  results  in  the  absurdity  of  saying 


242  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

— "everything  is  motion,  but  there  is  nothing  which  moves  or  is 
moved,"  "all  is  change  but  there  is  nothing  which  changes."  4 

The  more  thoroughly  physical  facts,  such  as  heat,  electricity, 
sound,  or  light,  are  analyzed,  the  clearer  it  becomes  that  these 
sensory  data  are  due  to  the  interactions  of  qualitatively  different 
entities — physical  entities,  sensory  system,  and  mind.  Nature 
must  consist  of  things,  that  is,  real  entities,  which  move  and  act, 
impinge  on  and  interpenetrate  one  another.  Certainly  the  ulti- 
mate things  must  at  least  be  centers  of  activity;  they  must  be 
things  which  have  locations,  habitations,  and  which  move  in  the 
space-time  order.  The  conclusion  that  I  draw  is  that  nature 
consists  of  a  vast  system  of  centers  of  activity  which  I  call 
individua  or  monads.  There  are  at  least  three  kinds  of  these 
monads — physical,  sentient,  and  intelligent  monads.  On  the  basis 
of  evidence  in  hand  from  their  respective  modes  of  behavior,  I 
am  unable  to  determine  whether  all  vital  monads  are  sentient, 
or  whether  a  vital  monad  is  nothing  more  than  a  special  constella- 
tion of  physical  or  chemical-physical  monads;  but  I  am  not  able 
to  see  how  the  distinctive  behavior  of  vital  monads — adaptation, 
growth,  restitution  of  lost  parts,  vicarious  functioning,  reproduc- 
tion, and  irritability — can  be  accounted  for  in  purely  physical 
and  chemical  terms.  It  seems  to  me  probable  then  that  nonliving 
and  living  monads  are  distinct  kinds  and  possible  that  all  vital 
monads  are  sentient.  I  think  that  there  is  an  inherent  difference 
of  kind  between  merely  sentient  and  rational  or  intelligent  monads. 
Thus  there  are  three  distinct  possible  kinds  of  monads  in  nature. 
So  far  is  the  universe  from  being  composed  of  elements  all  of  the 
same  kind  and  differing  only  quantitatively,  that  it  consists  of 
a  vast  multitude  of  several  qualitatively  different  kinds  of  ele- 
ments interrelated.     Nor  is  nature  simply  qualitatively  dual  in 

4  This  error,  from  which  Leibniz  and  Boscovich  were  not  free,  and  of 
which  there  are  traces  in  Ostwald  and  other  energeticists,  seems  to  me  to  be  a 
feature  of  Bergson's  philosophy  of  nature.  I  am  unable  to  understand  or  to 
follow  Bergson's  genesis  of  nature  and  space  from  duration  and  psychical  life 
conceived  as  nonspatial.  Bergson  both  presupposes  and  generates  matter  from 
his  6lan  vital.  Intellect,  he  says,  has  been  evolved  by  the  vital  impetus  as  an 
instrument  by  which  it  may  successfully  operate  upon  solid  and  inert  matter 
and  thus  surmount  the  latter.  On  the  other  hand,  intellect  and  matter  have 
been  evolved  together;  matter  thus  appears  to  be  a  product  of  the  very  in- 
strument which  has  been  developed  to  circumvent  it.  Now,  either  the  vital 
impetus  must  have  generated  matter,  must  have  set  up  the  obstacle  as  an 
aspect  of  its  play  with  itself,  as  Fichte's  ego  set  up  the  non-ego  (Anstoss) ; 
or  else  materiality,  which  is  spatiality,  is  not  an  internal  product  of  the  vital 
impetus,  which  is  pure  duration  or  becoming. 


PHYSICAL  REALITY  243 

its  constitution.  It  is  at  least  triple,  possibly  quadruple  or  even 
multiple.  There  is  a  qualitative  multiplicity  as  well  as  a  quanti- 
tative multitude  of  elements  in  it. 

Nature,  in  the  sense  of  the  whole  of  reality,  consists  of  a  vast 
system  of  interrelated  monads,  in  which  there  are  differences  of 
kind,  as  well  as  indefinite  gradations  of  degrees.  Even  the  ulti- 
mate things  of  physics,  whatever  they  be,  cannot  be  all  alike, 
though  they  may  all  consist  of  varying  combinations  of  the  samo 
fundamental  qualities.  They  must  have  a  poor  sort  of  individu- 
ality. Vital  and  sentient  monads  have  still  greater  diversity  in 
the  combinations  of  their  fundamental  qualities.  Individuality, 
in  the  sense  of  uniqueness  and  distinctness  in  the  combination  of 
fundamental  qualities,  increases  as  we  pass  from  merely  sentient 
to  intelligent  monads. 

A  higher  type  of  monad  includes  in  its  service  lower  types. 
Physical  monads  are,  in  living  organisms,  subservient  to  vital  and 
sentient  monads.  Vitality  and  sentience  in  turn  are  subservient 
to  personality.  The  human  organism  is  a  complex  of  physico- 
chemical  and  vital  monads  controlled  by  an  intelligent  monad. 
The  various  types  of  monads,  although  differing  in  kind,  are 
capable  of  affecting  one  another.  Organisms  both  affect  and  are 
affected  by  the  qualities  of  inorganic  monads;  minds  both  affect 
and  in  turn  are  affected  by  inorganic  or  vital  monads;  but,  as 
nature  rises  in  the  scale  towards  more  complex  individuality,  in 
other  words  towards  personality,  they  have  fuller  internal  unity 
of  activity  and  life.  The  relative  power  of  the  governing  principle 
increases.  Thus  an  intelligent  human  monad  has  much  more 
power  of  control  over  the  physical  environment  than  the  merely 
sentient  and  vital  monad  which  constitutes  the  being  of  the  lower 
animal. 

Nature  as  a  whole  consists  in  the  organic  interplay  or  inter- 
action and  intercommunication  between  the  various  types  of 
monads.  Thus  nature  is  a  vastly  diversified  system  of  individua, 
with  an  indefinitely  complex  and  dynamic  order  of  interrelated- 
ness  in  action  and  passion  among  its  members.  It  is  a  concrete 
and  living  totality.  Nature  truly  owns  the  sensory  qualities  that 
we  perceive  and,  doubtless,  many  that  we  do  not  perceive.  It 
owns  the  aesthetic  qualities.  It  owns  all  the  wealth  of  form  and 
color,  of  sound  and  movement,  of  taste,  of  beauty,  grandeur,  pic- 
turesque sublimity,  terror,  homely  friendliness,  vitality,  and  in- 


244  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

cessant  productivity,  which  we  find  in  it;  and  doubtless  it  owns 
a  vastly  greater  wealth  of  living  qualities  and  meanings,  which 
we  could  find  were  we  equipped  with  more  and  finer,  and  more 
synoptic  organs  of  response. 

Man,  with  all  his  imperfections,  is  a  living  and  creative  agent, 
interpreter  and  contemplator,  who  shares,  through  all  the  aspects 
of  his  being,  in  the  life  of  nature,  through  whose  veins  and  in 
whose  consciousness  the  life  of  nature  moves  and  comes  to  aware- 
ness of  itself.  What  nature  might  be  like  in  the  absence  of  human 
beings  to  perceive,  to  act,  to  enjoy  her,  we  cannot  know  and  we 
have  no  concern  with  such  an  unknown  "X" ;  any  more  than  we 
can  form  any  inkling  of  what  selves  would  be  like  if  there  were 
no  world  of  physical  nature.  Man,  both  as  a  private  and  unique 
center  of  feeling  and  action  and  as  a  social  being,  is  an  organic 
part  of  nature.  The  richest,  the  most  harmonious  and  compre- 
hensive meanings  of  nature  are  those  which  are  embodied  in  the 
richest,  most  harmonious  and  comprehensive  psychical  and  spir- 
itual life  of  man. 

The  relations  between  the  percipient,  his  percepts,  and  the 
abstract  world  of  the  physicist  I  conceive  to  be  as  follows : 

The  conditions  of  sense  perception  are — (1)  the  conscious 
subject;  (2)  the  sensory  system  composed  of  end  organs,  sensory 
nerves  and  brain;  and  (3)  physical  things.  The  sensory  system 
is  the  medium  of  communication  between  the  subject  and  the 
physical  thing.  If  any  part  of  the  sensory  system  is  deranged 
the  power  of  perception  is  deranged;  if  any  part  is  destroyed 
the  corresponding  power  of  perception  is  destroyed.  The  sensory 
system  functions  as  a  mechanism  of  selective  condensation  or  con- 
centration of  certain  aspects  of  the  vastly  complicated  motions 
and  qualitative  changes  in  the  ceaselessly  mobile  physical  universe, 
which  thus  act  as  stimuli  to  the  sensory-intellectual  system.  Thus 
the  sensory  nervous  system  is  a  centralizing  or  focalizing  select- 
ive synthetic  system,  corresponding  and  instrumental  to  the  cen- 
tralizing selective  and  synthetic  unity  of  the  mind.  Since,  in  the 
moment  of  perception,  the  sense  percept  is  identical  with  the 
object  perceived  and,  indeed,  is  a  perspective  or  aspect  of  the 
object,  there  must  be  a  fundamental  identity  of  structure  and 
process  between  the  sensory  system  and  the  processes  of  the  physi- 
cal order.  The  organism  must  be  a  very  complicated  and 
delicately    adjusted    system    of   physical    energies.      The   organ- 


PHYSICAL  REALITY  245 

ism  is  a  condensing  and  transforming  machine,  intermediary 
between  the  external  world  and  the  mind.  Further  evidence 
of  this  identity  of  type  between  the  organism  and  extra- 
organic  physical  entities  I  find  in  the  fact  that  the  sensory 
system,  when  no  longer  in  immediate  contact  with  objects,  is 
able  to  generate  images  of  them.  These  images  involve  all 
parts  of  the  sensory  system  and  are  nonmental,  in  the  sense  that 
the  mind  as  cognitive  does  not  produce  them.  A  visual  image 
involves  the  eye,  the  optic  nerve,  and  the  brain.  The  images  are 
of  the  same  general  character  as  their  extraorganic  counterparts; 
only  they  are  more  fleeting,  tenuous,  and  weaker,  because  of  the 
much  greater  fineness,  complication,  and  variety  of  functions  de- 
manded of  the  sensory  system  than  of  any  part  of  the  physical 
world.  Any  physical  object  is  a  particularized  bit  of  physical 
structure  and  process.  The  percipient's  organism  is  called  upon 
to  be  responsive  to  a  vast  variety  of  differences  in  the  structures 
and  movements  of  things. 

The  sensory  system  need  not  radically  distort  the  real  natures 
of  physical  things.  Normally,  it  condenses  or  epitomizes  them. 
It  focalizes  them  for  action.  Our  sense  percepts  are  series  of 
aspects  or  views,  selected  from  the  multitude  of  specific  aspects 
or  qualities  which  things  become,  in  the  vastly  complicated  and 
changing  relationships  of  the  physical  world.  ISTo  percept  is 
wholly  false  or  illusory  and  none  is  wholly  complete.  The  per- 
cipient, we  may  say,  takes  a  compact  succession  or  series  of  views 
or  perspectives  of  the  real  things.  Because  of  their  similarities 
and  of  their  importance  for  action,  the  differences  between  the 
successive  views  in  such  a  series  are  practically  negligible.  There- 
fore they  are  consolidated  into  images  which,  fused  with  succeed- 
ing sense  data,  are  taken  to  be  the  thing  in  its  wholeness  for 
purposes  of  behavior.  My  study  chair  may  be  perceived  from  an 
indefinite  variety  of  points  of  view,  but  the  practically  most  im- 
portant ones  are  the  similar  or  fairly  continuous  points  of  view 
which  I  get  as  I  approach  it  to  sit  in  it  and  actually  do  sit  in  it. 
Therefore,  I  ignore  all  the  other  possible  aspects  of  the  chair  and 
run  these  into  one  as  being  the  real  chair. 

I  repeat  that  in  perception  the  percept  is  identical  with  those 
partial  aspects  or  perspectives  of  the  real  object  that  are  signifi- 
cant for  human  behavior.  Apart  from  the  subject  the  world  of 
physical  objects  is  the  realm  of  potential  perceptions  or  sense 


246  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

perceivables.  It  owns,  in  posse,  all  the  colors,  shapes,  sounds, 
tastes,  temperatures,  etc.,  that  are  perceived  in  it,  and  doubtless 
a  great  many  qualities  besides.  If  our  sensory  systems  were  dif- 
ferent, were  more  microscopic  for  example,  we  should  doubtless 
find  a  corresponding  wealth  of  sensory  details  in  the  world. 

The  sense  qualities,  which  constitute  physical  reality  for  us, 
are  grouped  as  determinate  individual  things  or  unitary  com- 
plexes. But  all  sense  qualities  are  not  equally  individuated  or 
particularized  and  localized.  Some  have  preeminently  the  char- 
acter of  continua,  in  which  the  particular  things  are  bathed.  Thus 
there  are  very  significant  differences  in  the  relational  or  con- 
nexional  functions  of  the  sensory  attributes.  In  place  of  the  il- 
logical and  untenable  distinction  between  primary  qualities,  as 
objective,  and  secondary  qualities  as  subjective,  I  propose  a  rela- 
tivistic  distinction  between  the  sense  qualities  in  terms  of  their 
respective  degrees  of  spatial  diffusiveness,  pervasiveness,  or  degree 
of  localization.  Certain  sense  qualities  are  apparently  all-perva- 
sive or  universally  transmissible.  They  penetrate  or  encompass 
all  particulars.  The  light  that  reveals  a  body  and  is  reflected  from 
it,  absorbed  by  it,  or  that  passes  through  it,  the  gravitational  force 
that  holds  bodies  together,  the  electrical  undulations  that  pene- 
trate them,  the  lines  and  fields  of  force  that  irradiate  from  them 
— all  these  qualities  constitute  as  a  body's  field  of  action  and 
passion  the  whole  universe.  With  reference  to  them  the  particular 
thing  is  but  a  nodal  point  or  transient  center  of  interference  in 
the  ceaselessly  mobile  continuum  of  the  universe,  a  passing  con- 
centration of  intensity  and  velocity  in  the  endless  ebb  and  flow 
in  a  dynamic  world.  Other  sense  qualities,  such  as  colors,  odors, 
tastes,  the  "feel"  of  bodies,  are  more  localized,  specialized,  static 
differentiations.  The  particular  or  individuum  exists  only  as  part 
of  the  total  continuum  of  the  physical  universe ;  but  certain  of  its 
qualities  are  more  fluent  and  extensive  in  their  relations  than 
others.  All  the  sense  qualities  are  real,  but  some  embody  less  of 
the  thing's  particularity  and  more  of  its  dependence  in  the  dynamic 
whole,  while  others  embody  more  of  its  particularity  and  less  of 
its  dependence. 

The  physicist's  world  of  atoms,  electrons,  etherial  undulations, 
the  ether  continuum,  and  so  forth,  is  a  conceptual  construction 
devised  for  his  special  purposes,  which  are  to  calculate  and  explain 
the   general   phenomena   and   interrelationships   of   space,    time, 


PHYSICAL  REALITY  247 

mass,  motion,  energy;  and  the  more  specific  phenomena  and 
interrelationships  of  heat,  light,  color,  sound,  electricity.  It 
furthers  these  purposes  of  physics  to  construct  conceptual  mechan- 
ical and  dynamical  models  that  are  simpler,  finer,  and  more 
rigorous  than  sense  data.  The  abstract  world  of  the  physicist  is 
a  product  of  the  constructive  imagination  guided  by  logical  postu- 
lates and  controlled  by  reference  to  sense  data.  The  difference 
between  the  poet's  world  of  nature  and  the  physicist's  is  that  the 
former  is  not  so  closely  controlled  by  sense  data  and  is  guided 
by  the  intuitive  analogies  of  feeling  rather  than  by  logical  postu- 
lates. The  physicist's  world  has  logical  reality;  it  is  valid,  but  it 
may  or  may  not  have  existential  reality.  It  may  be  that  electrons 
and  the  ether  actually  exist.  I  do  not  know.  At  present  they 
are  hypothetical  extensions  and  supplementations  of  empirical 
reality,  justified  by  their  logical  uses.  If  they  really  exist  they 
must  have  more  qualities  and  a  more  determinate  character  than 
the  physicist  needs,  for  his  abstract  purposes,  to  endow  them  with. 
They  cannot,  if  actual,  have  mere  extension,  figure,  motion,  mass. 
They  must  have  potential  color,  sound,  temperature,  "feel."  And 
they  must  be  determinate  things  with  some  degree  of  individu- 
ality. If  the  electrons  and  the  ether  are  experienced  by  some 
beings  they  are  actual  realities,  not  mere  logical  postulates.  If 
they  are  capable  of  being  perceived  they  are  real.  For  in  order 
that  anything  may  be  existentially  real  it  must  be  actually  per- 
ceived or  capable  of  being  perceived.  It  must  be  a  sense  per- 
ceivable. When  you  try  to  count  out  of  the  universe  all  actual 
and  possible  experience  and  all  experients  and  ask  what  is  left 
you  can  return  no  intelligible  answer. 

As  to  what  exists  in  the  physical  realm,  behind  and  beyond 
actual  experience,  our  answer  must  be  that  we  do  not  know  and 
can  only  guess.  If  we  should  ever  become  able  to  say  that  we 
know,  which  is  quite  possible,  then  the  behind  and  beyond  would 
have  ceased  to  be  behind  and  beyond  and  would  have  become  parts 
of  the  system  of  experience.5 

5  Since  the  above  chapter  was  in  substance  written  there  has  appeared 
a  very  important  discussion  of  the  relation  between  the  world  of  sense  and 
the  world  of  physics  in  Bertrand  Russell's  Our  Knowledge  of  the  External 
World  as  a  Field  for  Scientific  Method  in  Philosophy.  See  lectures  iii  and  iv. 
I  have  adopted  from  Mr.  Russell  the  happy  phrase  "series  of  aspects."  His 
discussions  of  time  and  space  are  also  important.  The  perusal  of  Mr.  Rus- 
sell's book  has  not  led  me  to  modify  my  views,  but  it  has  helped  me  to  clarify 
them,  I  hope. 


248  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

APPENDIX 

PANPSYCHISM 

Panpsychism  is  a  higher  form  of  pan-biotism  or  hylozoism.  The 
panpsychist  holds  not  only  that  all  nature  is  alive  and,  consequently, 
that  the  cleavage  we  make  between  the  inorganic  and  the  organic 
realms  is  simply  due  to  our  inability  to  recognize  the  vital  processes 
in  the  inorganic  realm ;  but  that  the  whole  of  nature  is  the  operation 
of  a  vast  system  of  interrelated  centers  of  experience  or  of  psychical 
monads,  and  that  unconscious  and  nonpsychical  matter  does  not  really 
exist.  In  modern  philosophy  this  doctrine,  is  held,  among  others, 
by  Bruno,  Leibniz,  Berkeley,  Eichte,  Schopenhauer,  Fechner,  Lotze, 
and  Paulsen.  More  recently  it  has  been  advanced  by  Josiah  Eoyce, 
C.  A.  Strong,  J.  M.  E.  McTaggart,  Mary  W.  Calkins,  James  Ward, 
and  L.  W.  Stern.6  It  is  erroneously  attributed  to  William  James. 
Whether  Bergson  is  a  panpsychist  I  cannot  quite  make  out.  Miss 
Calkins  advances  the  following  arguments  on  its  behalf: 

1.  The  only  reality  experienced  by  us  is  mental,  and,  since  all 
reality  is  experienced,  all  reality  must  consist  of  experients. 

2.  She  points  to  the  growth  of  the  dynamic  conception  of  nature 
from  the  self-activity  of  Fichte,  the  will  of  Schopenhauer,  to  con- 
temporary dynamic  or  energetic  conceptions  of  nature,  as  supporting 
the  doctrine.  The  value  of  this  argument  depends  on  whether  one 
is  constrained  to  admit  that  all  force  or  energy  is  will  force  or  will 
energy.  Certainly  present-day  physicists  do  not  appear  to  find  them- 
selves constrained  to  admit  that  molecules,  atoms  or  electrons  are 
centers  of  volition.  I  find  it  easier  to  conceive  that  there  are  some 
centers  of  activity  that  are  not  even  momentarily  conscious,  than  to 
conceive  that  atoms  or  electrons  feel,  desire  and  strive.  They  attract 
and  repel  one  another,  it  is  true ;  but  it  does  not  follow  that  they  must 
love  and  hate  and  sorrow  and  rejoice.  I  do  not  understand  why 
there  should  be  such  striking  apparent  differences  in  the  behavior 
of  persons  and  inanimate  things,  if  things  are  but  rudimentary 
persons.  It  is  quite  true  that  our  laws  of  nature  may  all  be  only 
statistical  averages,  which  leave  out  of  account  the  indefinitely  numer- 
ous individualities  whose  behavior  they  profess  to  generalize.  But 
it  does  not  follow  that  the  individuals  are  all  of  the  same  funda- 
mental type,  namely  persons  or  psychical  monads. 


•Eoyce,  The  World  and  the  Individual,  Vol.  II. 

Ward,  The  Realm  of  Ends. 

Stern,  Person  und  Sache. 

Mary  W.  Calkins,  Philosophical  Bevieiv,  Vol.  28,  pp.  115-146. 


PHYSICAL  REALITY  249 

In  order  to  account  for  the  fact  that  we  do  not  recognize  the 
persons  or  selves  that  constitute  the  so-called  inanimate  realm,  Miss 
Calkins  makes  an  ingenious  classification  of  relations  between  selves. 
There  are,  she  says,  three  kinds  of  relationships  between  selves:  1. 
Intercommunicating  relationships  which  obtain  between  human 
persons.  2.  Communicating  relationships  which  obtain  between 
human  persons  and  animals.  I  communicate  with  my  dog  and  he 
with  me.  He  obeys  my  behests  and  I  recognize  his  deep  devotion, 
but  he  does  not  know  what  I  feel,  nor  I  what  he  feels.  3.  Noncom- 
municating  relationships  obtain  between  human  persons  and  the  lower 
animals,  plants  and  inorganic  things.  But  is  it  not  a  simpler  hy- 
pothesis to  say  that  I  cannot  hold  communication  with  a  cabbage  or 
a  rock  because  there  is  no  one  there  to  communicate  with?  The 
theory  that  we  cannot  communicate  with  these  lower  persons  because 
of  the  differences  between  our  time  spans  or  rates  of  conscious  rhythm 
is  ingenious,  but  I  do  communicate  with  the  dog  and  the  cat  whose 
time  spans  must  be  different  from  mine,  and  I  simply  cannot  com- 
municate with  the  cabbage  or  rock.  Since  I  am  unable  to  communi- 
cate with  any  other  mind  otherwise  than  through  the  medium  of  his 
body  and  my  body,  I  do  not  see  why  I  should  assume;  first,  that 
both  our  bodies  are  made  up  of  a  lot  of  little  minds  and,  second, 
that  the  physical  bodies  with  which  I  can  hold  no  psychical  conver- 
sation are  likewise  made  up  of  little  minds. 

The  argument  that  in  knowledge  subject  and  object  are  strictly 
correlative,  and  therefore  knowledge  is  unintelligible  unless  in  every 
instance  the  object  be  another  subject,  has  little  or  no  value.  It 
depends  on  the  homeopathic  dogma  that  a  mind  can  know  only  that 
which  is  of  the  same  character  as  itself.  Now,  the  panpsychist 
admits  that  we  know  other  minds  only  through  their  physical  ex- 
pressions. What  point,  then,  is  there  in  arguing,  that  I  cannot  know 
your  mind  unless  your  body  be  made  up  of  inferior  souls,  through 
which  my  mind  or  superior  soul  has  indirect  intercourse  with  your 
mind  ?  There  is  no  logically  significant  difference  between  the  prob- 
lem as  to  how  my  mind  can  transcend  its  own  subjective  states  in 
knowing  another  object,  whether  we  state  that  other  object  to  be  a 
mind  in  a  body,  or  a  mind  ruling  a  lot  of  little  minds,  or  a  body  that 
has  no  mind  at  all.  The  panpsychist  assumes;  first,  that  in  order 
that  in  knowledge  a  mind  may  transcend  itself  the  objects  of  its 
knowing  must  be  mental;  second,  he  must  then  argue  further  that 
the  minds  which  we  all  believe  we  know  something  of,  namely  other 
human  minds,  are  known  through  the  intercourse  of  the  knower's 
mind,  not  directly  with  the  other  minds  which  he  knows,  but  in- 
directly, through  the  medium  of  bodies  which  appear  to  be  very 


250  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

different  from  the  minds  which  are  known  by  means  of  them  but 
which  bodies  must  nevertheless  be  made  up  of  inferior  grades  of 
minds.  The  whole  argument  is  perverse,  since  it  starts  from  an 
arbitrary  assumption  akin  to  the  proposition  that  he  who  would  drive 
fat  oxen  must  himself  be  fat. 

In  truth  we  know  finite  mind  only  through  its  contrast  with  the 
nonmental  order.  Mind  and  physical  nature  are  complementary 
aspects  of  the  actual  world.  Their  true  relation  is  one  of  organic 
interdependence  in  the  totality  of  the  real.  Eeduce  either  term  to 
complete  identity  with  the  other  and  both  lose  their  distinctive 
meaning.  The  whole  development  of  knowledge  and  practice,  and, 
indeed,  the  entire  evolution  of  selfhood,  has  involved  this  funda- 
mental contrast  and  relation  of  physical  nature  and  mind. 

Panpsychism  fails  to  account  for  the  appearance  of  physical  things 
with  qualities  empirically  different  from  minds,  and  which  yet  serve 
as  instruments  for  mind's  self-expression.  Certain  specific  physical 
expressions  are  taken  to  be  signs  of  mind.  Why  should  there  be  any 
signs  required  if  panpsychism  be  true?  Why  should  not  bodiless 
minds  know  each  other  directly? 

Our  knowledge  of  other  minds  is  ejective.  We  eject  a  mind  into 
physical  complexes  wherever  there  are  intelligible  signs  of  mind. 

Primitive  man,  we  are  told,  ejected  an  anima  or  soul  into  every 
sort  of  physical  object  which  arrested  his  attention.  The  progress 
of  positive  knowledge  has  been  in  the  direction  of  limiting  the  scope 
of  this  ejective  distribution  of  souls  in  nature.  The  differentiation 
and  integration  of  experience  through  science  has  brought  with  it 
the  narrower  limitation  of  the  ejective  reference  of  minds  to  physical 
complexes  that  have  close  and  weighty  resemblance  to  our  own  bodies. 

What  do  we  find  in  inorganic  nature  which  bears  a  close  analogy 
to  the  unity  of  a  rational  mind?  Suppose  that  all  bodies  are  made 
up  of  momentary  centers  of  consciousness,  how  does  the  panpsychist 
explain  the  evolution  of  these  into  human  personalities  without  as- 
suming the  continuous  unifying  or  synthetic  activity  of  conscious- 
ness, which  is  rational  mind?  And,  if  he  does  assume  this  synthetic 
unity,  what  need  is  there  of  reducing  physical  nature  to  a  system 
of  inferior  souls  ?  Of  course  it  may  be  said  that  these  low-grade  souls 
do  not  evolve  into  true  selves.  They  always  remain  different  in  kind. 
But  then  the  argument  for  panpsychism  from  the  principle  of  con- 
tinuity falls  to  the  ground.  There  must  in  either  case  be  novelty 
somewhere  in  the  process,  and  the  common  sense  view  that  physical 
things  are  not  souls  is  the  more  consonant  with  the  findings  of  ex- 
perience. Why  not  admit,  as  simpler  and  not  less  intelligible,  that 
souls  and  nonpsychical  existents  may  interact? 


PHYSICAL  REALITY  251 

The  argument  that  the  laws  of  nature  are  like  acquired  habits 
of  mental  and  bodily  behavior  seems  to  me  to  rest  on  a  rather  far- 
fetched analogy.  The  argument  on  behalf  of  panpsychism  that  the 
uniformities  in  physical  nature  represent  very  rough  and  inaccurate 
statistical  averages  which  conceal  the  real  complexity,  individuality, 
and  variability  of  the  finite  souls  which  constitute  physical  nature, 
just  as  our  human  vital  statistics  cover  up  the  rich  complexity,  indi- 
viduality, and  variability  in  the  social  world,  is  not  convincing.  Uni- 
formity and  predictability  will  be  much  less  easy  to  find  where  indi- 
viduality is  complex  and  rich.  Where  there  is  readily  calculable 
uniformity  which  can  be  applied  in  technical  practices,  does  not  that 
indicate  the  absence  of  psychical  individuality?  The  fact  that  the 
laws  of  human  behavior  are  more  difficult  to  discover  and  formulate 
and  so  much  less  exact  than  the  laws  of  the  behavior  of  physical 
things  seems  pretty  clearly  to  indicate  that  the  latter  are  not  im- 
mediate manifestations  of  finite  centers  of  consciousness.  This  does 
not  mean  that  there  is  no  uniformity  in  human  nature,  but  that  it 
is  uniformity  of  a  different  order  than  the  physical.  Intermediate 
between  the  two  is  biological  uniformity. 

In  whatsoever  manner  psychical  individuals  may  be  distributed 
outside  human  ken,  nature's  controlling  meaning  is  the  development 
of  psychical  individuality.  Matter  is  a  positive  factor  in  the  cosmical 
process  of  organization  or  personalization.  "Inorganic  nature,"  re- 
garded as  existing  independent  of  perceptual  experience,  is  the  ab- 
stract conceptual  reality  of  a  common  world  structure,  which  is  taken 
to  be  the  permanent  and  universal  condition  of  perception.  This 
conceptual  reality  is  reached  by  elimination  of  the  specific  reactions 
of  percipient  organisms.  For  example,  the  luminiferous  ether  is  the 
remainder  of  spatial  motion  required  to  account  for  perceptions  of 
light  and  color  when  the  specific  reactions  of  the  percipient  have  been 
deducted  from  the  total  phenomenon.  Correlate  these  deductions 
with  others  derived  from  electric  and  magnetic  phenomena  and  one 
gets  the  electro-magnetic  theory  of  light.  But  these  concepts  are 
derivative,  not  primary  realities.  The  latter  are  found  in  the  realm 
of  immediate  experience.  Our  psychophysical  organisms  are  non- 
eliminable  elements  in  the  totality  of  nature.  The  nonperceptual 
physical  entity  called  in  to  explain  perception  has  only  a  reality  of 
the  second  order,  that  of  logical  relation  to  the  primary  reality.  The 
general  structures  and  forces  of  nature,  the  "matter,"  "space," 
"motion"  and  "body"  of  common  sense,  the  "mass,"  "energy,"  "ether," 
"atom,"  "electron,"  etc.,  of  science  are  symbols  of  certain  universally 
experienced  and  persistent  features  of  perception,  which  are  describ- 
able  and  calculable  in  fairly  simple  and  precise  formulae.    The  total 


252  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

reality  must  be  a  system  or  society  of  interacting  and  interpatient 
beings,  together  with  the  general  conditions  of  their  social  and  indi- 
vidual lives.  The  unity  of  the  whole  is  that  of  a  teleological  meaning 
whose  character  is  most  adequately  expressed  in  personality. 

Our  next  step  will  be  an  inquiry  into  the  meaning  of  life,  its 
evolution  and  its  relation  to  mind. 


CHAPTER  XX 


LIFE    AND    MECHANISM 


Life  may  be  described  provisionally  as  the  totality  of  the 
peculiar  properties  manifested  by  organized  matter.  They  are, 
specifically,  the  following:  (1)  irritability,  the  specific  kind  of 
responsiveness  to  stimuli  manifested  by  living  beings;  in  the 
higher  animals,  at  least,  and  possibly  in  all  organisms,  irritability 
is  accompanied  by  sensitivity ;  (2)  tropism,  the  impulse  to  turn 
towards  or  away  from  certain  stimuli ;  this  may  be  called  reflex 
action,  and  instincts  are  complex  reflexes:  (3)  the  power  of  self- 
reparation;  (4)  the  power  of  adaptation  or  self -adjustment  and 
self-development ;  (5)  the  power  of  self -reproduction  with  varia- 
tion; (6)  the  higher  organisms  have  the  additional  power  of 
memory  and  of  choice  among  the  memory  elements  reproduced 
from  past  experience ;  thus  the  higher  organisms  manifest  intelli- 
gence and  will.  In  short,  in  the  case  of  man,  at  least,  a  living 
organism  seems  to  be  able  to  free  itself  from  the  blind  routine  of 
mechanical  responses  to  external  or  innate  internal  stimuli  through 
the  modification  of  reflex  responses  by  internal  stimuli  engendered 
by  memory  and  intelligent  reflection  thereon.  Summing  up  the 
characteristics  of  a  living  organism  in  its  most  developed  form, 
we  may  say  that  an  organism  is  a  dynamic  unity  which  adapts 
itself  to  its  environment,  develops,  maintains,  repairs  and  repro- 
duces itself ;  exhibiting  in  these  processes  the  powers  of  sentience, 
memory,  selection  and  rearrangement  of  the  elements  of  its  experi- 
ence for  better  adaptation  of  itself  to  the  environment  and  of  the 
environment  to  itself,  and  conscious  choice  in  the  sense  of  the 
variation  of  its  innate  powers  of  response  to  satisfy  ends  or  desires 
formed  by  the  activity  of  the  intelligence  from  the  matter  of 
experience.1 


1  Professor  J.  S.  Haldane  argues  persuasively  from  the  physiological  ac- 
tivities of  the  organism  in  maintaining  normals;  such  as  alveolar  carbon 
dioxide  pressure,  the  regulation  of  the  hydrogen  ion  concentration  and  the 
balance  of  nutritive  substances,  that  the  normals  of  living  organisms  are  the 
expression  of  what  the  organism  is  and  that  life  itself  is  a  unique  reality. 
See  his  article  "The  New  Physiology,"  Science,  N.  S.,  Vol.  xliv,  pp.  621-631. 

253 


254  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

Is  there  a  supermechanical  life  principle  operative  in  organ- 
ized matter ;  or  are  the  properties  of  the  living  organism,  as  above 
enumerated,  nothing  but  effects  of  more  complicated  physico- 
chemical  mechanisms  of  the  same  order  as  those  manifest  in  the 
realm  of  nonliving  matter  ?  The  vitalist  maintains,  "that  me- 
chanical formulas  do  not  begin  to  answer  the  distinctively  biolog- 
ical questions.  .  .  .  We  need  new  concepts,  such  as  that  of  the 
organism  as  an  historic  being,  a  genuine  agent,  a  concrete  indi- 
viduality, which  has  traded  with  time  and  has  enregistered  within 
itself  past  experiences  and  experiments,  and  which  has  its  conative 
bow  ever  bent  towards  the  future.  We  need  new  concepts,  because 
there  are  new  facts  to  describe,  which  we  cannot  analyze  away  into 
simpler  processes.  ...  To  the  biologist  the  actualities  are  organ- 
isms and  their  doings,  and  life  is  a  generalized  concept  denoting 
their  peculiar  quality."  2  In  short,  for  the  vitalist,  while  life  is 
resident  and  operative  in  matter,  life  is  not  mere  matter.  Life 
is  a  principle  which  exerts  a  directive  and  selective  control  over 
physical  energy.  The  universal  tendency  of  the  physical  process 
to  the  degradation  of  energy  is  resisted  by  living  beings  which  are 
able,  within  quite  narrow  limits,  of  course,  to  transform  and 
direct  physical  energy  in  their  own  interests.  Thus  the  individual 
organism  is  more  than  the  physical  or  chemical  sum  of  its  parts. 
"Life  is  not  a  factorial  element  in  any  mechanical  calculation  of 
the  work  done  by  a  living  organism,  since  life  is  the  managing 
director  of  the  work."  3 

Vitalism,  in  the  general  sense  of  belief  in  the  uniqueness  of 
life,  does  not,  properly  speaking,  mean  that  the  living  organism 
is  in  part  a  pure  mechanism ;  and  that,  in  addition  to  its  mechan- 
ically working  parts,  there  is  a  nonperceptual  and  indeterminable 
agency  at  work  (an  entelechy  or  psychoid,  in  Driesch's  terms) 
which  occasionally  interferes  with  the  operation  of  the  machine. 
A  biologist  surely  can  have  no  use  for  such  a  notion.  He  is  a 
scientist,  and  all  science  presupposes  that  there  is  an  unequivocal 
or  determinate  sequence  in  the  events  with  which  it  deals,  in  other 
words  that  definite  antecedent  conditions  have  definite  consequents. 
If,  as  Jennings  says,4  Driesch's  vitalism  means  that  "two  systems 

-  J.  Arthur  Thomson,  Article  "Life  and  Death,"  Encyclopedia  of  Re- 
ligion and  Ethics,  Vol.  VIII, 

'J.  G.  Simpson,  "Art.  Biology,"  Encyclopedia  of  Religion  and  Ethics. 

*  Jennings,  H.  S.,  "Heredity  and  Personality,"  in  Science,  1911  and 
Science,  1912. 


LIFE  AND  MECHANISM  255 

absolutely  identical  in  every  physicochemical  respect  may  behave 
differently  under  absolutely  identical  conditions"  the  conception 
is  unscientific.  The  scientific  biologist  is  concerned  to  determine 
one-one  correspondences  between  physicochemical  conditions  and 
the  phenomena  of  life.  The  scientist  seeks  to  determine  the 
"particular  go"  or  "how"  of  events,  and  to  make  his  determinations 
as  exact  as  possible;  but,  if  there  are  specific  differences  between 
those  types  of  behavior  associated  with  physicochemical  mechan- 
isms which  are  called  organic  types,  and  those  types  of  mechanical 
behavior  that  have  no  accompanying  organic  phenomena,  surely 
it  is  not  the  province  of  genuine  science  to  assert  dogmatically 
that  there  is  nothing  in  the  former  complexes  which  differ  in 
principle  from  the  latter.  A  philosophical  vitalist  can  admit  that 
the  life  principle  is  a  determinate  power  which  works  in  specific 
fashions,  but  he  contends  that  it  differs  uniquely  from  a  non-living 
machine,  and  he  makes  this  contention  on  good  empirical  grounds. 
He  contends  that  the  organism,  as  a  whole,  is  a  machine  inhabited 
and  directed  by  a  principle  having  just  those  powers  that  are 
manifested  in  the  phenomena  of  life,  sentience,  intelligence  and 
will.  Whether  all  these  phenomena  are  manifested  by  all  organ- 
isms is  a  question  to  be  settled  by  empirical  evidence. 

What  does  the  mechanist  mean  by  saying  that  every  organism 
is  a  machine  ?  If  he  means  only  that  every  vital  process  involves 
a  specific  physicochemical  process  which  is  in  one-one  corre- 
spondence with  it.,  I  do  not  see  why  there  should  be  any  quarrel 
between  the  mechanist  and  the  vitalist.  If  he  means  that  there 
are  no  real  differences  between  organic  and  inorganic  processes, 
except  differences  in  the  complexity  of  the  spatial  configurations 
of  their  elements,  that  is  an  assumption  which  not  only  is  far,  as 
yet,  from  being  proved  but  does  not  seem  to  do  justice  to  the 
phenomena  of  life.  As  J.  Arthur  Thomson  puts  it,  "an  adequate 
idea  of  life  requires  a  synthesis,  and  that  again  is  impossible  with- 
out sympathy.  We  must  use  our  every-day  experience  of  living- 
ness  ...  to  enliven  the  larger  data  of  biology  .  .  .  We  must  seek 
to  envisage  the  variety  of  life — hundreds  of  thousands  of  distinct 
individualities  or  species;  the  abundance  of  life — like  a  river 
always  tending  to  overflow  its  banks ;  the  diffusion  of  life — explor- 
ing and  exploiting  every  corner  of  land  and  sea ;  the  insurgence  of 
life — self-assertive,  persistent,  defiant,  continually  achieving  the 
apparently   impossible;   the   cyclical   development   of  life — ever 


256  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

passing  from  death,  through  love,  to  death ;  the  intricacy  of  life — 
every  cell  a  microcosm;  the  subtlety  of  life — every  drop  of  blood 
an  index  of  idiosyncracies ;  the  interrelatedness  of  life — with 
myriad  threads  woven  into  a  patterned  web;  the  drama  of  life — 
plot  within  plot,  age  after  age,  with  every  conceivable  illustration 
of  the  twin  motives  of  hunger  and  love;  the  flux  of  life — even 
under  our  short-lived  eyes ;  the  progress  of  life — slowly  creeping 
upward  through  unthinkable  time,  expressing  itself  in  ever  nobler 
forms ;  the  beauty  of  life — every  finished  organism  an  artistic 
harmony;  the  morality  of  life — spending  itself  to  the  death  for 
other  than  individual  ends;  the  mentality  of  life — sometimes 
quietly  dreaming,  sometimes  sleep  walking,  sometimes  wide- 
awake; and  the  victory  of  life — subduing  material  things  to  its 
will,  and  in  its  highest  reaches  controlling  itself  towards  an  in- 
creasing purpose."  5 

In  brief,  then,  the  vitalist  argues :  ( 1 )  that  the  daily  function 
of  living  bodies  by  which  they  maintain  through  delicate  internal 
adjustments  the  normals  or  equilibria  necessary  to  life  cannot  be 
accounted  for  in  mechanical  terms  alone;  (2)  that  the  patent  facts 
of  organic  plasticity  manifested  in  the  organism's  adaptiveness 
and  selectiveness  are  supermechanical ;  (3)  that  the  development 
of  the  individual  organism  cannot  be  explained  as  due  merely  to 
a  specialized  configuration  of  nonliving  physical  elements ;  (4) 
that  the  evolution  of  organisms,  with  its  wonderful  variability, 
adaptiveness,  coordination  and  correlation  of  parts  and  organs 
and  modifications  of  the  environmental  conditions,  is  still  less 
accountable  on  merely  mechanical  terms. 

What  is  a  machine  ?  In  the  simplest  terms  a  machine  is  a 
humanly  devised  contrivance  for  achieving  an  end.  Thus,  we 
speak  of  physical  machines,  of  vital  machines,  such  as  the 
mechanism  of  digestion  or  speech  or  walking,  of  political  and 
social  and  even  of  literary  machinery.  In  this  broad  sense  any 
system  of  interdependent  parts,  which  when  put  in  operation  pro- 
duces definite  results,  is  a  machine.  In  this  loose  sense  of  the 
term  there  is  no  incompatability  between  mechanism  and  guidance 
or  direction.  In  mechanics  a  machine  is  an  instrument  by  means 
of  which  we  may  change  the  direction  and  velocity  of  a  given 


5  "Life    and    Death"    (Biological)    Hastings'   Encyclopedia   of    'Religion 
and  Ethics,  Vol.  VIII. 


LIFE  AND   MECHANISM  257 

motion.6  In  this  special  sense  a  machine  is  a  human  contrivance, 
depending  for  its  operation  upon  the  utilization  of  the  inanimate 
and  therefore  blindly  working  forces  or  motions  which  exist  in 
nature  independent  of  the  human  will.  The  mechanical  concep- 
tion of  nature,  taken  on  all  fours,  means  that  all  the  operations 
of  nature  result  from  the  blind  and  inevitable  alterations  in  the 
spatial  configuration  of  mass  particles.  (Since  the  mass  particles 
are  ever  in  motion,  all  natural  changes  consist  in  the  alteration  of 
the  distribution  of  the  mass  particles.)  Given  a  specific  distribu- 
tion of  mass  particles,  whatever  follows  therefrom  is  simply  the 
blind  resultant  of  the  antecedent  distribution  of  moving  particles. 
The  ultimate  elements  involved  are  changeless,  the  laws  of  motion 
are  invariant  and  a  quantitative  equivalence  runs  through  all  the 
transformations.  The  latter  conception  is  expressed  in  the  prin- 
ciple of  the  conservation  of  energy,  energy  being  regarded  as  the 
ground  of  motion.  Nature,  then,  is  an  unimaginably  vast  and 
intricate  system  of  mass  units  in  motion.  The  entire  system  at 
any  moment  Y  is  the  necessary  mathematical  or  mechanical 
equivalent  of  the  system  at  the  next  preceding  moment  X.  All 
changes  in  the  system  of  nature  are  simply  blind  and  compen- 
satory motions  in  the  whole  spatial  configuration  of  mass  units 
which  repel  and  attract  one  another.  The  ultimate  explanation  of 
any  change  is  a  problem  in  kinematics,  the  geometry  of  motion. 
At  the  present  time  the  prevailing  tendency  of  physics  is  to  find 
the  ultimates  in  negatively  and  positively  charged  electrical  units 
— electrons.  Mass  or  inertia  is  a  function  of  electric  repulsion, 
and  velocity  and  figure  of  motion  are  functions  of  electrical  repul- 
sion and  attraction.  Matter,  in  all  its  qualities,  as  these  appear 
to  our  crude  senses,  is  the  resultant  of  the  interrelations  between 
the  spatial  configurations  which  we  call  physical  bodies  and  the 
spatial  configurations  which  we  call  living  bodies.  The  perceptual 
qualities  which  are  the  bodies  of  common. sense  are  the  expressions 
of  the  microscopic  mechanisms  of  the  percipient  organisms  and 
external  bodies  in  their  microscopic  intermotions.  Images,  con- 
cepts, feelings  and  appreciations  are  the  echoes  of  the  microscopic 
motions  set  up  within  the  brain  by  the  impact  of  microscopic 
motions  external  to  the  brain.  The  motions  within  the  brain  thus 
impelled  die  down  slowly.     Hobbes  said,  "Thought  is  decaying 


1  Century  Dictionary. 


258  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

sense" ;  and,  we  may  add,  sense  is  the  intermingling  of  microscopic 
impacts  and  rebounds  of  mass  units  at  the  periphery  of  the  organ- 
ism. What  the  thing  is  that  moves  or  whether,  indeed,  there  be 
a  thing  that  moves,  deponent  saith  not.  An  electron  is  a  center  of 
electric  charge  and  is  in  motion — but  what  is  it  that  is  in  motion  I 
Can  a  microscopic  motion  hit  another  microscopic  motion  without 
there  being  anything  to  hit  or  to  be  hit  ? 

The  up-to-date  form  of  the  mechanistic  conception  of  nature 
is  a  very  tenuous  and  elusive  form  of  materialism.  Nothing  exists 
but  matter  and  nothing  happens  but  blindly  pushed  and  pulled 
nonmatter  in  motion.  Matter  is  force,  but  force  or  energy  is 
motion.  An  immovable  obstacle  is  a  very  stable  system  of  micro- 
scopic motions — of  what  ?  Answer — of  motions.  An  organism, 
whether  it  be  a  plant,  an  oyster  or  a  man,  is  a  fairly  stable  system 
of  mechanical  motions.  Its  colloidal  constituents  consist  of  chem- 
ical elements,  and  these  in  turn  are  systems  of  electrons,  and  an 
electron  is  a  geometrical  moving  point — an  event  particle,  as  Mr. 
A.  N.  Whitehead  calls  it,  or  a  point  instant,  as  Mr.  Samuel 
Alexander  calls  it.  But  where  is  a  point  and  when  is  an  instant  ? 
A  point  never  seems  to  be  where  it  is,  nor  an  instant  when  it  is. 
The  latest  form  of  materialism  or  mechanism  seems  to  dissolve 
the  solid  world  of  common  sense  into  a  movie  film  that  moves  so 
rapidly  that  the  distraught  spectator  can  make  out  no  figures  in 
it.  It  seems  like  a  rapidly  dissolving  phantasmagoria  of  compli- 
cated nothings.  Like  Bergson's  real  duration  it  is  a  present  which 
is  not  a  present,  but  is  the  invisible  progress  of  the  past  gnawing 
into  the  future  (whatever  that  may  mean),  and,  as  it  moves  with 
incredible  swiftness,  it  casts  a  shadow  called  space  in  which  we 
poor  mortals  try  to  stave  off  vertigo  by  vainly  imagining  that  we 
are  somewhat  permanent  and  fairly  solid  centers  of  activity  in 
interaction  and  interpassion  with  other  centers  of  activity. 

I  am  an  empiricist,  and  I  maintain  that,  certainly,  in  the  case 
of  human  organisms,  and,  presumptively,  in  the  case  of  other 
organisms,  the  living  organism  is  a  self-developing,  self-adjusting, 
self-regulating,  self -regenerating,  self-reproducing  principle  which 
dwells  and  operates  in  a  physicochemical  machine.  The  organic 
machine  is  a  super-machine,  since  it  is  the  dwelling  place  of  a 
living  being.  The  biotic  and  psychic  whole  is  greater  than  the 
physical  or  chemical  sum  of  its  parts.  It  is  a  living  individual 
and   its  microscopic  mechanisms   are  not  the  same  when  they 


LIFE  AND   MECHANISM  259 

function  as  parts  of  the  living  individual  and  when  they  cease 
to  do  so.  Nonliving  elements  are  functionally  organic  to  living 
beings.  Their  synthesis  in  an  organism  involves  the  emergence 
into  patent  activity  of  a  vital  principle  which  must  have  been 
latent  antecedent  to  the  specific  synthesis  which  manifests  the 
distinctively  vital  phenomena.  Life  is  what  it  does,  life  is  its  own 
ways  of  behavior.  A  living  being  is  the  unitary  subject,  of  which 
the  specific  predicates  are  just  the  various  features  of  livingness. 
Obviously,  an  organism  is  the  ephemeral  product  of  the  forces  of 
a  universe  that  is  sublime  and  terrible,  sublime  in  its  super- 
abundant creativeness,  terrible  to  the  single  organism  which  it 
makes  and  destroys  with  such  magnificent  prodigality.  Life  does 
not  arise  from  the  lifeless,  since  there  is  no  lifeless  universe. 
Life  appears  in  a  vast  variety  and  innumerable  succession  of  indi- 
vidual forms,  since  the  most  salient  character  of  the  universe  is 
just  that  it  ceaselessly  gives  birth  to  living  individuals.  Life  is  no 
whit  robbed  of  its  meaning  and  place  in  reality  by  the  admission 
that  there  is  a  one-one  correspondence  between  every  specific  vital 
phenomenon  and  a  specific  physicochemical  process.  There  are 
in  the  universe  of  realities  nonliving  elements,  but  every  such 
element  may  be  organic  or  functional  to  organisms,  for  the  most 
concrete  and  specific  character  of  reality  as  a  whole  is  just  that  it 
endlessly  gives  rise  to  living  individuals.  The  living  and  the  non- 
living do  not  exist  apart  from  one  another. 

Logically  the  metaphysical  problem  of  vitalism  versus  material- 
ism or  mechanism  is  simply  the  most  striking  form  of  the  more 
general  problem — whether  reality  as  a  whole  is  most  adequately 
interpreted  in  terms  of  the  poorest  and  most  abstract  features  of 
experience,  whether  in  order  to  understand  reality  as  a  whole  we 
are  to  rub  out  all  diversity,  concreteness,  individuality,  qualitative 
discontinuity  and  novelty  or  creativeness;  or  whether  we  are  to 
say  that  the  full  meaning  of  reality  can  only  be  garnered  by  taking 
account  of  the  fact  that  empirically  it  ever  gives  rise  to  a  multitude 
of  multiform  individualities,  concrete  and  creative.  The  mechan- 
ical aspect  of  reality  is  real,  but  it  is  abstract.  Living  organisms, 
in  their  graduated  ascent,  are  increasingly  adequate  revelations  of 
the  secret  of  reality.  Livingness  is  the  most  significant  character- 
istic of  reality,  to  which  nonlivingness  is  subservient  or  instru- 
mental. Livingness,  in  turn,  is  the  basis  for  the  development  of 
conscious  mind.     Conscious  livingness  realizes  its  fuller  selfhood 


260  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

in  the  achievement  of  personality.  The  organism  is  the  basis  of 
mind,  and  mind  is  the  organism  capable  of  becoming  at  once  for 
itself  and  for  the  universe — enjoying  its  own  growth  through  the 
conscious  enjoyment  of  the  universe. 

Before  we  are  in  a  position  to  appreciate  the  full  meaning  of 
personality  it  will  be  necessary  for  us  to  consider  more  in  detail 
the  relations  of  life,  mind,  and  evolution.  This  we  shall  do  in  the 
next  chapter. 


CHAPTER  XXI 

EVOLUTION,    LIFE   AND   MIND 

I.     The  Factors  of  Organic  Evolution 

In  its  simplest  and  most  general  form  the  doctrine  of  evolution 
means  that  the  higher,  in  the  sense  of  the  more  complex,  organic 
forms  have  ascended  from  the  lower,  in  the  sense  of  the  simpler, 
organic  forms;  and  that  this  ascent  has  been  the  result  of  the 
modification  of  the  simpler  forms  through  natural  causes.  By 
"natural  causes"  is  meant  causes  of  the  same  order  as  the  causes 
that  are  now  observed  to  operate  in  the  origins  and  life  histories 
of  organisms.  If  all  the  qualities  and  modes  of  behavior  of  organ- 
isms at  present  existing,  and  therefore  under  observation,  can  be 
accounted  for  in  mechanical  terms,  it  follows  that  the  entire  evolu- 
tionary ascent  of  life  as  well  as  its  primal  origin  can  be  accounted 
for  in  mechanical  terms.  If  there  are  difficulties  in  the  way  of  the 
complete  explanation  of  life  as  it  at  present  exists,  these  difficulties 
will,  of  course,  be  greatly  increased,  when  one  surveys  the  whole 
panorama  of  organic  evolution.  On  the  other  hand,  if  there  are 
no  serious  difficulties  in  the  way  of  giving  a  mechanical  explana- 
tion of  the  behavior  of  existing  organisms,  the  same  principles  of 
explanation  will  apply  to  the  origin  and  evolution  of  life.  In 
short,  the  problem  of  evolution  can  only  be  solved  by  the  applica- 
tion, to  the  history  of  life,  of  principles  derived  from  an  analysis 
of  empirical  livingness. 

Evolution  may  be  described  in  general  terms,  as  Herbert 
Spencer  describes  it,  as  the  change  from  simple  to  complex  forms 
of  existence  characterized  by  concomitant  processes  of  differentia- 
tion and  integration;  more  briefly,  organic  evolution  means 
increasing  individuation,  or  the  movement  towards  fuller  selfhood. 
W.  K.  Clifford  described  it  neatly  as  the  tendency  of  the  cosmic 
process  to  personify  itself.  Increase  of  individuation  or  selfhood 
involves  increased  power  of  association.  The  richest  or  most  com- 
plex individualities,  human  persons,  are  capable  of  and  do  form 

261 


262  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

the  most  varied  and  extensive  social  organizations.  Therefore  we 
are  justified  in  saying,  on  empirical  grounds,  that  a  society  of 
rational  and  free  persons  is  the  highest  stage  of  evolution  that  we 
can  conceive.  To  say  that  the  infusoria  or  the  oyster  might  regard 
the  movement  of  life  from  themselves  onward  as  a  retrogression  is 
just  to  litter  a  smart  quibble,  for  it  is  a  fact  that  a  human  society 
of  the  type  just  indicated  is  the  most  dominant  form  of  living 
organization.  It  is  a  foolish  objection  to  raise  to  the  interpreta- 
tion of  evolution  as  the  progression  of  life  towards  the  highest 
conceivable  type  of  humanity,  to  say  that  it  is  a  conceited 
anthropomorphism.  For  science,  as  well  as  philosophy,  can  never 
be  anything  else  than  an  interpretation  of  human  experience  by  the 
instrumentality  of  human  thinking.  And  the  first  and  last  aim  of 
philosophy  is  to  interpret  human  experience  in  its  totality,  and  to 
interpret  the  universe  in  terms  of  the  totality  of  human  experience. 
Let  us  assume,  then,  that  life  first  appeared  on  the  earth, 
possibly  in  quite  simple  forms,  as  the  immediate  accompaniment 
of  a  specific  chemical  complex ;  since  life,  as  we  know  it,  manifests 
itself  only  in  association  with  specific  chemical  configurations. 
Whether  the  simplest  organisms  are  sentient  it  is  impossible  to  say. 
Perhaps  sentience  is  coextensive  with  organic  responsiveness. 
Micro-organisms  do  manifest  powers  of  discrimination  and  do 
use  the  trial  and  error  methods  which,  at  higher  levels  of  organiza- 
tion, are  regarded  as  indubitable  signs  of  intelligence.  Professor 
H.  S.  Jennings  says,  after  a  most  exhaustive  examination  of  the 
behavior  of  certain  lower  organisms,  "So  far  as  objective  evidence 
goes  there  is  no  difference  in  kind,  but  a  complete  continuity 
between  the  behavior  of  lower  and  higher  organisms" ;  *  "objective 
investigation  is  as  favorable  to  the  view  of  the  general  distribution 
of  consciousness  throughout  animals  as  it  could  well  be."  2  "It  is," 
says  J.  Arthur  Thomson,  "impossible  to  think  of  intelligently 
controlled  behavior  evolving  from  behavior  in  which  mentality  was 
wholly  absent,  and  it  seems  clearest  to  think  of  all  organisms  as 
psychophysical  individualities."  3  Increase  in  variety,  range  and 
discriminativeness  of  sensitivity,  and  the  appearance  of  memory 
with  its  power  of  enabling  the  organisms  to  profit  from  experience, 

1  Jennings,  Behavior  of  the  Lower  Organisms,  p.  335. 

2  Ibid.,  p.  337. 

*  Thomson,  The  System  of  Animate  Nature,  Vol.  I,  Lecture  vi,  p.  219.  The 
whole  lecture  is  very  interesting.  Indeed  the  entire  work  is  a  valuable  com- 
prehensive treatment  of  the  philosophy  of  biology,  to  be  cordially  recommended. 


EVOLUTION,  LIFE  AND  MIND  263 

its  power  of  conscious  enregistration,  as  J.  Arthur  Thomson  so 
well  puts  it,  are  correlated  with  the  appearance,  and  increase  in 
complexity  and  relative  bulk,  of  the  nervous  system.  It  cannot 
well  be  gainsaid  that  intelligence  and  memory  are,  in  those  animal 
forms  which  most  indubitably  manifest  them,  in  some  sense  func- 
tions of  the  nervous  system.  The  big-brained  animals  are  those 
that  manifest  the  highest  intelligence.  In  man,  the  most  intelli- 
gent biological  being,  the  cerebral  cortex  contains  some  9000 
millions  of  cells.  Anatomically  his  brain  is  as  far  in  advance  of 
the  brain  of  a  chimpanzee  as  psychologically  his  mentality  is  in 
advance  of  the  mentality  of  a  chimpanzee. 

But  this  argumentation  auts  two  ways.  If  the  growth  in  men- 
tality is  correlated  with  the  growth  in  the  nervous  system,  can 
there  be  any  mentality  where  there  is  no  nervous  system?  How 
can  paramcecium  and  stentor  (two  animalculse  studied  by  Jen- 
nings) have  sentience  if  they  have  no  nerve  substance  ?  Perhaps 
they  are  all  nerves,  as  they  are  all  stomachs,  hands  and  feet.  But 
they  have  no  differentiated  nerve-tissues.  If  the  lowest  animals 
have  sentience  why  not  plants  ?  Was  Wordsworth  right  in  his 
belief  that  "every  flower  enjoys  the  air  it  breathes"  ?  At  most  the 
consciousness  of  the  lowest  organisms  would  be  like  that  of  the 
body-monad  of  Leibniz — mens  momentanea,  sen  carens  recorda- 
tions— momentary  and  disconnected  flashes  of  sentience.  But  it  is 
quite  as  hard  to  see  how  this  momentary  sentience  can  be  contin- 
uous with  human  reason  and  be  the  lineal  ancestor  thereof,  as  it 
is  to  see  how  from  a  merely  physicochemical  aggregate  sentience 
could  emerge  as  a  result  of  "complication,"  to  use  the  terms 
employed  by  Dr.  S.  Alexander.  The  evolutionist  works  under  the 
domination  of  the  principle  of  continuity  and  seeks  to  close  all  the 
gaps  in  the  scale  of  livingness.  A  saltation,  a  gap,  a  breach  of 
continuity,  is  stench  to  his  nostrils.  Nevertheless,  unless  he  is  a 
sheer  dogmatic  materialist,  he  must  admit  saltations,  discontinu- 
ities. If  evolution  be  not  a  creative  process  in  which  novelties 
emerge,  it  is  meaningless.  Is  there  not  as  great  a  breach  of  con- 
tinuity between  the  mind  of  an  Aristotle,  a  Shakespeare,  or  a 
Goethe  on  the  one  hand,  and  the  mind  of  an  orang-outang  on  the 
other  hand,  as  there  is  between  the  mind  of  the  orang-outang  and 
the  mind  of  a  stentor?  Is  there  not  a  striking  discontinuity 
between  the  Javan  or  Sumatran  jungle  and  the  civilization  of 
London  or  New  York,  a  difference  due  to  the  difference  in  the 


264  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

minds  which  inhabit  them?  It  is  one  proposition  to  admit  there 
are  minds  or  feelings  of  some  sort  wherever  there  are  the  sorts  of 
behavior  which  seem  to  imply  feeling;  quite  another  proposition 
to  maintain  that  the  mind  of  the  white  man  has  been  evolved  from 
a  mind  of  the  same  order  as  the  mind  of  a  stentor.  Does  it  follow 
that  because  we  have  vegetative  needs  therefore  our  minds  are 
descended  from  the  minds  of  plants  ?  If  there  be  real  distinction 
between  organized  and  unorganized  matter,  why  boggle  at  admit- 
ting a  distinction  between  sentient  and  insentient,  rational  and 
nonrational  organisms  ?  Either  one  should  go  the  whole  way  and 
assume  that  all  matter  is  besouled,  and  that  the  besouling  only 
differs  in  degree  of  complication  as  the  configuration  of  matter 
differs  in  like  manner  (universal  hylozoism  or  hylopsychism  a  la 
Haeckel)  ;  or  one  should  face  the  logical  music  and  admit  frankly 
that  the  attempt  to  make  a  fetish  of  the  principle  of  continuity 
and  explain  the  highest  mentality  as  a  descent  or  ascent  from  the 
lowest  mentality,  and  this  again  from  a  mentality  that  is  not  men- 
tality but  only  the  "potency"  thereof,  is  a  quibble.  When  we 
survey  the  panorama  of  organized  matter  or  livingness  we  find 
structural  and  functional  gaps.  When  we  survey  the  panorama  of 
behavior,  as  implying  consciousness  and  intelligence,  we  find  even 
greater  gaps.  The  mental  differences  between  two  human  beings 
are  much  greater  than  the  observable  anatomical  differences;  the 
mental  differences  between  an  intelligent  civilized  human  being 
and  a  monkey  seem  to  me  even  greater  than  the  anatomical  dif- 
ferences. 

Why  not  admit  that  "mind,"  as  we  know  it  in  ourselves,  is  a 
creative  infusion  in  the  organic  series ;  that,  while  human  minds 
are  descended  from  other  human  minds  by  psychogenesis,  human 
mind  cannot  be  accounted  for  as  the  descendant  of  infrahuman 
mind?  Mind  is  the  biggest  kind  of  saltation  or  "mutation"  in 
the  evolutionary  series.  It  is  the  most  striking  instance  of  a 
creative  novelty  in  the  history  of  life.  But  the  story  of  life  is 
crowded  with  such  novelties.  It  seems  to  me  to  follow  that  the 
story  of  evolution  is  only  the  spreading  out,  over  an  indefinitely 
long  past,  of  the  creative  process,  which  in  childlike  fashion  our 
spiritual  ancestors  supposed  to  have  taken  place  in  six  solar  days ; 
and  that  the  entire  story  is  the  endless  creative  expression  of  a 
transcendent  life  which  is  the  source  and  ground  and  goal  of  the 
whole  process. 


EVOLUTION,   LIFE  AND   MIND  265 

Sentiency  is  the  beginning  of  consciousness.  Evolutionists 
who  have  recognized  the  impossibility  of  accounting  for  conscious- 
ness, as  a  by-product  of  merely  physical  agencies,  have  assumed 
that  sentiency  is  a  primary  factor  in  evolution.  Such  is  the  view, 
in  one  form  or  another,  of  E.  D.  Cope,  C.  S.  Minot,  Wilhelm 
Wundt,  Josiah  Royce,  H.  Bergson,  and  James  Ward.  Mr.  Cope, 
for  example,  held  that  matter,  force  and  consciousness  were  the 
primary  factors  in  evolution ;  that  all  reflexes,  and  in  general,  all 
unconscious  physiological  activities,  are  of  the  same  order  as 
habits,  which,  originally  acquired  with  conscious  effort,  become 
unconscious  as  they  become  automatic.  The  inorganic  realm  he 
conceived  as  the  field  of  habit-automatisms  acquired  long  ago. 
Quite  similar  is  Wundt's  view,  except  that  Wundt  interprets 
"force,"  which  Cope  makes  a  primary  factor  in  evolution,  in  terms 
of  striving  or  rudimentary  volition.  Quite  similar  in  this  respect 
to  Wundt's  view,  is  Bergson's  doctrine  of  the  vital  impetus,  which 
in  turn  is  akin  to  the  doctrine  of  LaMarck.  This  general  doctrine 
can  be  traced  back  through  the  monads  of  Leibniz  to  the  en- 
telechies  of  Aristotle.  The  logical  motive  for  such  speculations  is 
the  principle  of  continuity.  If  life  be  a  primary  factor,  whereas 
sentience  and  the  higher  forms  of  consciousness  have  subsequently 
come  into  being  as  a  result  of  more  complex  organization  of  life, 
then  one  has  to  admit  discontinuity  or  saltation  in  the  evolution 
process.  Now  the  supervention,  upon  simple  sentience,  of  con- 
scious memory,  generalization  from  past  experience  and  expecta- 
tion of  the  future;  the  supervention,  upon  these  qualities,  of 
reflective  analysis  and  synthesis  and  of  self -consciousness ;  the 
appearance  and  development  of  rationality  and  sociality,  the  be- 
ginnings and  growth  of  moral  systems,  of  science  and  religion  and 
art ;  in  short  the  origin  and  development  of  the  higher  intelligence, 
social  order,  and  human  culture — all  these  are  cases  of  empirical 
discontinuity,  of  novelties  or  creative  syntheses,  in  the  evolution 
process.  Certainly,  the  appearance  of  social  order  and  culture  are 
no  less  striking  and  significant  emergences  of  qualitative  novelties 
in  the  evolution  process  than  the  appearance  of  life  or  simple 
sentience.  Either  we  must  admit  a  transcendent  power  of  creative 
synthesis,  which  functions  intermittently  in  the  history  of  life; 
or  we  must  say  that  the  novelties  which  appear  at  successive 
critical  points  in  the  evolution  process  and  which  constitute  nodes 
in  the  growth  of  life  have  been  always  present  potentially  or 


266  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

latently  in  the  life  process.  But,  since  it  cannot  be  denied  that 
significant  novelties  have  appeared,  both  in  the  history  of  man  and 
in  the  prehuman  history  of  life,  it  seems  to  me  that  the  above  two 
alternatives  really  amount  to  the  same  thing.  To  deny  that  quali- 
tatively novel  powers  and  achievements  have  appeared  in  the  life 
process  is  to  deny  the  facts  and,  by  implication,  to  assert  that  all 
history,  all  temporal  process,  is  illusion.  History  means  not  the 
eternal  recurrence  of  the  same,  but  a  constant  succession  of  differ- 
ences. "To  make  history"  is  to  initiate  real  novelties.  The  words 
of  the  world-weary  skeptic,  "There  is  nothing  new  under  the 
sun,"  are  false.  To  admit  significant  novelties  in  the  cosmic  life 
process  is  to  admit  a  power  of  creative  synthesis.  The  purport  of 
the  admission  for  an  interpretation  of  the  universe  would  be  the 
same,  whether  one  held  that  this  creative  principle  was  immanent 
in  the  simplest  forms  of  life  or  that  it  entered  organisms  and  began 
to  function  in  them  at  specific  stages  in  their  evolution,  as  a  super- 
venient principle  granted  to  the  organic  individual  by  the  uni- 
versal order  and  entering  organisms  from  a  transcendent  spring  of 
creativeness.  The  principle  of  continuity  would  seem  to  be  most 
fully  satisfied,  on  naturalistic  premises,  if  one  could  conceive  the 
creative  principle  as  fully  and  adequately  immanent  in  a  world  of 
atoms  or  of  infusoria.  This  I  am  unable  to  do,  since  then  the 
world  of  atoms  or  infusoria  would  not  be  what  it  appears  to  be ; 
it  would  be  the  infinite  source  and  ground  of  the  whole  created 
order.  It  would  have  become  what  the  philosophical  religionist 
means  by  "God." 

II.    The  Mechanistic  Doctrine  of  Evolution 

Mechanistic  metaphysics  is  materialism.  A  purely  mech- 
anistic doctrine  of  evolution  means,  briefly,  that  all  the  so-called 
creative  novelties,  richer  individualities  and  forms  of  association 
that  have  emerged  in  the  evolutionary  process  are  nothing  but  the 
blind  resultants  of  the  blindly  shifting,  spatial  configurations  of 
mass  particles. 

According  to  the  latest  form  of  the  atomic  theory  of  matter, 
mass-particles  are  moving  points  which  attract  and  repel  one 
another  because  of  their  electric  charges.  If  two  particles  attract 
one  another  it  is  because  they  have  complementary,  that  is,  positive 
and  negative,  charges.    If  they  repel  one  another  they  must  have 


EVOLUTION,  LIFE  AND  MIND  267 

the  same  kinds  of  charges.  The  mass  and  the  inertia,  which  is  but 
another  name  for  the  resistance  of  a  body  to  motion  by  the  impact 
of  another  body,  of  a  particle  or  a  system  of  particles  are  functions 
of  their  electric  charge.  Thus  the  electronic  theory  of  matter 
reduces  all  other  qualitative  diversities  in  the  physical  world  to 
differences  in  the  geometrical  patterns  of  motions  due  solely  to  the 
attractions  and  repulsions  of  electrically  charged  points.  Thus 
matter,  in  the  ordinary  sense  of  extended,  and  therefore  divisible, 
bodies,  is  reduced  to  moving  configurations  of  indivisible  points. 
It  is  not  unfair  to  say  that,  on  this  view,  what  common  sense 
regards  as  matter  consists  of  nonmatter  in  motion.  The  mechan- 
istic doctrine  of  evolution  would  account  for  all  the  qualitative 
diversities  and  novelties  of  the  evolution  process,  from  planetes- 
imals  to  man,  as  being  the  blind  products  of  the  incessant  shifting 
in  the  configurations  of  electrified  points.  The  laws  of  evolution 
are  thus  special  cases  of  the  laws  of  physical  motion.  The  prob- 
lem of  evolution  is  a  vast  series  of  problems  in  the  geometry  of 
motion. 

I  regard  this  mechanical  doctrine  of  evolution  as  inadequate  on 
the  following  grounds: 

1.  The  geometry  of  motion  does  not  explain  how  one  set  of 
empirical  physical  qualities  arises,  and  is  transformed  into  another 
set  of  different  qualities.  The  redistribution  of  electronic  points 
may  be  a  necessary  condition  of  the  existence  of  empirical  quali- 
ties. I  do  not  know,  since  I  do  not  know  whether  matter,  as  it 
exists  apart  from  the  percipient  organism,  consists  solely  of  elec- 
trified points  in  motion.  If  it  does  so  consist  the  points  must 
occupy  space  and  move  in  it;  and  therefore  empty  space  must  be 
an  objective  reality.  If  there  is  no  empty  space  then  there  can  be 
no  ultimately  indivisible  elements  of  matter;  but  I  can  form  no 
consistent  conception  of  an  absolutely  empty  space.  If  all  space 
be  filled  with  force;  if,  in  other  words,  space  be  the  whole  field 
of  energy ;  then  the  ultimate  physical  reality  must  consist  of  con- 
centration points  or  nodes  of  energy  and  their  dynamic  interrela- 
tions. Then  the  ultimate  physical  reality  is  a  system  of  inter- 
related energy  centers. 

Let  us  return  to  the  question  of  the  inadequacy  of  an  abstract 
kinematical  explanation  of  empirical  qualities.  For  example :  the 
motions  of  the  electrons  which  make  up  the  neuro-muscular  system 
of  a  violinist  produce  alterations  in  the  arrangements  of  the  elec- 


268  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

trons  which  make  up  his  violin ;  these  alterations  produce  altera- 
tions in  the  motions  of  the  electrons  which  make  up  my  sensory 
and  central  nervous  system.  I  see  a  violinist  playing;  I  hear  a 
system  of  sounds;  and  I  feel  emotions;  I  feel  sweet  or  sad  or 
stirring  "music  of  humanity";  there  are  aroused  in  me  compas- 
sionate, noble,  or  stirring  thoughts ;  perhaps  the  music  sets  me  off 
in  a  train  of  speculation.  The  mechanical  theory  has  explained 
the  varied  and  significant  empirical  qualities  of  the  musical  event 
and  its  consequences,  by  explaining  them  out  of  existence.  But 
the  concrete  reality  is  the  totality  of  empirical  qualities.  Mechan- 
ism alone  does  not  account  for  the  actual  realm  of  experience.  The 
latter  is  a  varied  and  rich  totality  of  living  qualities  with  their 
meanings.  It  includes  the  so-called  primary  and  secondary  phys- 
ical qualities,  inextricably  interfused  with  aesthetic  and  other 
affectional  qualities  and  with  meanings.  A  world  denuded  of  all 
empirical  qualities  is  not  only  not  the  actual  world,  it  is  not  even 
an  intelligible  explanation  of  the  latter.  A  percipient  and  active 
organism  is  a  real  factor  in  the  constitution  of  actual  nature ;  but 
a  percipient  and  active  organism  is  a  living,  feeling,  thinking 
being.  If  percipients  be  illusory  epiphenomena,  then  the  world 
of  pure  mechanics  is  an  even  more  ghostly  and  unaccountable  illu- 
sion, since  this  world  is  the  offspring  of  the  thought  of  beings  who 
perceive  and  think.  In  order  to  account  for  the  world  as  it  is, 
and  to  account  for  its  becoming  what  it  is,  we  must  presuppose 
living,  feeling,  thinking  beings;  in  short  we  must  presuppose 
psychophysical  organisms. 

2.  If  the  mechanical  theory  were  an  adequate  account  of 
nature,  then  the  processes  of  the  latter  should  be  in  general  re- 
versible. But  these  processes  are  irreversible.  The  second  law  of 
thermodynamics  is  a  generalized  statement  of  the  irreversibility  of 
the  physical  order.  By  the  exercise  of  human  ingenuity  the  down- 
ward course  of  physical  events  is  in  some  degree  altered.  The 
universal  process  of  the  degradation  of  energy  is  temporarily 
arrested.  But  even  this  apparent  exception  is  no  real  exception 
to  the  principle  that  the  entropy  of  a  physical  system  tends  towards 
a  maximum ;  that  is,  that  energy  is  always  passing  from  available 
to  unavailable  forms.  The  qualitative  changes  in  nature,  includ- 
ing all  the  novelties  which  arise  in  the  evolutionary  process  and 
all  the  achievements  of  human  art,  seem  to  be  conditioned  by  this 
principle.    The  energy  of  the  sun's  heat  is  transformed  into  chem- 


EVOLUTION,   LIFE  AND   MIND  269 

ical  energies  of  plants.  Through  metabolism  and  combustion  these 
make  food  and  fuel,  and  thus  give  rise  to  vital  energy  in  animals 
and  to  industrial  energy.  Man  eats  food,  and  chemical  energy  is 
thus  transformed  directly  into  nervous  and  muscular  energy,  with- 
out passing  through  the  form  of  physical  heat  energy,  and,  thus, 
perhaps  without  being  directly  subject  to  the  law  of  entropy. 
Thus  human  energy  is  applied  to  arrest  the  process  of  degradation 
of  physical  energy,  and  to  turn  it  into  more  available  channels  for 
the  satisfaction  of  human  wants.  Thus  man  increases  his  own 
power,  lengthens  his  own  life,  improves  the  chances  of  life  for  his 
offspring,  multiplies  his  wants  and  their  satisfactions ;  in  short  he 
enlarges  and  enhances  the  psychical  values  of  existence ;  but  always 
subject  of  the  irreversible  directions  of  the  order  of  nature,  as 
expressed  in  the  second  law  of  thermodynamics. 

Increase  of  entropy  dogs  the  footsteps  of  life,  to  issue  in  abso- 
lute death,  unless  we  admit  the  possibility  of  some  creative  source 
of  physical  energy  beyond  our  present  ken.  Such  a  source  would 
be  beyond  the  range  of  the  purely  mechanical  conception  of 
nature.4 

Perhaps  the  marvelous  manifestations  of  intra-atomic  energy 
revealed  in  radioactive  transformations  give  an  inkling  of  how 
such  a  creative  source  may  work.  The  facts  of  radioactivity  may 
require  the  modification,  or  limitation  of  scope,  of  the  second  law 
of  thermodynamics. 

3.  The  law  of  the  conservation  of  energy  is  frequently  taken 
to  be  the  basic  principle  of  nature  and  to  imply  the  absolute 
validity  of  mechanism.  If  the  sum  total  of  energy  in  the  universe 
is  constant,  then  every  change  in  nature  can  mean  only  a  quanti- 
tative alteration  of  relations  among  finite  constellations  of  energy; 
and  the  universe  must  be  a  huge  automatic  machine  whose  parts 
may  undergo  innumerable  alterations  of  position ;  but  which,  as  a 
whole,  preserves  its  identical  character  as  a  fixed  quantity.  The 
law  of  the  conservation  of  energy  proves  nothing  of  the  sort.  In 
the  first  place,  "energy"  is  a  conceptual  abstraction.  What  is 
found  in  concrete  nature  is  an  unceasing  variety  of  qualitative 
changes,  going  through  more  or  less  definite  sequences.  In  terms 
of  conventional  constants  of  "work,"  which  means  primarily  the 
ability  to  move   something   against   gravitational   attraction,   or 

4For  example  the  "sorting  demon"  of  J.  Clerk  Maxwell's  hypothesis  is 
such  an  extramechanistic  notion. 


270  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 


a 


..gainst  some  counteracting  force,  quantitative  ratios  have  been 
established  as  approximately  true  for  many  of  these  transforma- 
tions. In  making  these  determinations  the  physicist  abstracts 
from  the  qualitative  uniqueness  of  the  concrete  empirical  processes. 
He  does  not  "explain"  the  actual  complexities  of  the  qualitative 
changes  involved.  His  energy,  which  is  assumed  to  be  constant,  is 
a  construction  of  the  scientific  imagination.  He  postulates,  and 
approximately  verifies,  its  constancy  only  within  the  limits  of 
finite  and  determinable  closed  systems  of  physical  energy.  He 
can  know  nothing  of  an  absolute  sum  total  of  energy.  The  con- 
servation of  energy  is  a  working  hypothesis  which  works  within 
given  finite  mechanical  systems. 

To  say  that  the  sum  total  of  energy  in  the  absolute  system  of 
the  universe  is  constant  seems  to  me  unmeaning.  If  it  be  a  sum 
total,  then  the  energy  of  the  universe  must  be  a  so  much,  however 
unimaginably  great;  it  must  be  a  finite  quantity.  A  quantity  is 
relative  to  a  unit,  hence  the  universe  must  consist  of  a  finite 
number  of  units  of  energy.  But  our  estimation  through  units  is 
relative  and,  since  the  universe  is  relative  to  nothing  else,  it  can- 
not be  regarded  as  a  finite  quantity.  Again,  energy  is  the  power 
of  doing  work,  and  to  do  work  is  to  move  something.  Nothing 
moves  the  whole  universe  from  one  place  to  another,  and  the 
universe  does  not  move  itself  against  any  obstacle.  There  seems 
to  be  no  meaning  in  saying  that  the  universe,  in  the  sense  of  the 
absolute  totality  of  things,  does  work. 

Moreover,  since  any  sum  total,  however  great,  is  a  finite  quan- 
tity, if  the  universe  has  existed  through  indefinite  past  time,  then, 
in  accordance  with  the  law  of  the  degradation  of  energy  the  uni- 
verse must  long  since  have  completely  run  down  to  the  state  of 
maximum  entropy,  and  be  now  in  a  state  of  complete  quiescence 
and  death,  all  energy  having  long  since  passed  into  forms  unavail- 
ing for  the  maintenance  of  life.  Suppose,  on  the  other  hand,  that 
the  universe  be  assumed  to  have  had  a  beginning  in  time.  Then, 
to  account  for  this  beginning,  one  must  go  behind  the  principles  of 
mechanics.  And,  if  one  suppose  that  in  its  present  state  it  is  a 
purely  mechanical  system,  then  a  state  must  finally  come  about  in 
which  the  universe  will  be  an  inert  mass  of  uniform  temperature. 
Then  there  will  no  longer  be  any  work  done,  and,  since  energy 
means  the  power  of  doing  work,  all  energy  will  have  vanished  from 
our  supposed  universe. 


EVOLUTION,  LIFE  AND  MIND  271 

In  brief,  if  the  working  postulates  and  conceptions  of  abstract 
mechanics  and  physics  be  set  up  as  absolute  metaphysical  dogmas 
we  run  into  a  series  of  contradictions.  The  attempt  to  turn  the 
concepts  and  formulae  of  physics  directly  into  metaphysics  breaks 
down.  The  total  universe  cannot  be  a  finite  system  of  mechanical 
energies,  and  the  laws  of  mechanics  are  not  adequate  expressions 
of  the  total  reality.  The  obvious  reason  is  that  the  procedure  of 
mechanics  is  adapted  to  deal  only  with  certain  highly  abstract 
aspects  of  the  concrete  world,  namely,  a  thought  constructed  and 
conventional  realm  of  pure  space,  time,  motion,  and  mass.5 

Every  event  in  nature  is  the  resultant  of  an  indefinite  com- 
plexity of  determining  conditions.  In  the  quest  for  causal  con- 
nections as  naturalists  we  rightly  ignore  this  indefinite  complexity, 
since  it  would  involve  us  in  an  endless  search.  We  pick  out  the 
immediate  and  relatively  constant  antecedent  of  the  particular 
type  of  event  that  we  desire  to  account  for.  This  antecedent  is 
always  one  that,  for  the  special  purpose  in  hand,  we  can  treat  as 
the  cause.  The  purpose  may  be  to  fix  the  guilt  of  a  crime,  to 
determine  the  conditions  of  profit  in  an  industry,  or  to  formulate 
a  mechanical  relation  in  physics  or  chemistry.  The  rigid  bodies, 
the  different  types  of  motion,  the  lines  and  fields  of  force,  or  the 
atoms  and  electrons,  of  the  physicist,  are  just  as  truly  purposive 
constructions  as  are  the  "adaptations"  and  "selective  agencies"  of 
the  biologist.  And  the  latter  are  just  as  truly  purposive  construc- 
tions as  the  legal  and  moral  constructions  which  we  employ  to 
interpret  our  complex  social  life. 

It  is  by  this  method  of  abstraction  and  purposive  construction 
that  science  arrives  at  its  mechanico-causal  formulae.  The  teem- 
ing qualitative  diversity  of  concrete  experience  is  reduced  thereby 
to  identities  of  relation.  The  actual  bases  of  these  thought-con- 
structed identities  are  incomplete  similarities  in  the  sequences  of 
events.  Repetition  of  resembling  cases  is  the  experiential  ground 
for  our  causal  determinations.  Probably  no  two  instances  of 
causal  change  are  absolutely  the  same. 


0  These  concepts  as  employed  in  physics  are  all  convenient  working  ab- 
stractions, not  accurate  pictures  of  reality.  Cf.  James  Ward,  Naturalism  and 
Agnosticism,  passim. 


272  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

III.    Evolution  and  Teleology 

Actual  life  and  experience  live  in  the  present  and  forwards 
towards  the  future,  while  causal  theory  explains  retrospectively. 
It  tries  to  account, for  the  present,  which  is  real,  by  the  artificial 
reconstruction  of  a  past  which  no  longer  exists;  but  the  ultimate 
value  and  purpose  of  all  causal  explanation  is  to  enable  the  beings 
who  make  it,  and  can  use  it,  to  use  the  abstract  skeletons  of  causal 
explanation  in  their  present  living  experience  in  order  to  achieve 
in  the  future  more  satisfactory  experience.  All  retrospection, 
from  an  individual's  judgment  of  his  own  past  to  a  review  of  the 
history  of  humanity,  of  life  and  the  solar  system,  has  its  meaning 
and  value  solely  in  its  uses  for  the  enrichment  and  harmonization 
of  life  and  experience,  which  is  life  as  it  feels  to  living  individuals. 
Reality  is  living  and  prospective.  Its  historical  retrospections 
are  for  the  enhancement  of  its  living  forward  movement.  Life  is 
individuated,  and  it  moves  towards  increase  of  individuation  and 
association.  There  is,  in  reality,  no  static  and  mechanical  nature, 
except  as  a  figment  of  the  geometrizing  intellect.  Living  nature 
is  the  forward  movement  of  individuals  towards  increasing  indi- 
viduation and  association,  which  is  the  complement  of  individua- 
tion. Evolution  is  a  living  analytic-synthetic  or  differentiating 
/  and  integrating  process,  moving  towards  more  individuation.  The 
continuity  of  direction  in  the  whole  process  can  be  understood  fully 
1  in  terms  akin  to  what  in  human  life  is  meant  by  value-inspired 
activity.  When  a  new  type  of  individual  has  appeared  on  the 
scene,  we  may,  with  fair  measure  of  success,  find  close  analogies 
to  already  existing  types.  Man  is  a  good  deal  like  the  anthropoid 
ape.  It  may  be  true  that  the  aboriginal  man  was  first  cousin  to 
the  ape.  It  may  be  true  that  there  were  apelike  men  before  there 
were  men,  although  I  do  not  see  by  what  right  anyone  can  assert 
that  there  were  with  dogmatic  certainty.  Man  may  have  appeared 
subsequently  or  prior  to,  or  simultaneously  with,  the  ape.  At  any 
rate,  the  differences  between  man  and  the  ape  are  more  significant 
for  man  and  more  disastrous  for  the  ape  than  the  resemblances  of 
the  two.  The  fallacy  to  which  the  mechanical  evolutionist  is  most 
prone  is  the  fallacy  which  consists  in  covertly  assuming,  where 
similarities  or  superficial  identities  of  structure  and  behavior  are 
found,  that  these  are  the  all-important  matters,  and  that  the 
differences,  uniquenesses,  novelties  are  unimportant  and  therefore 


EVOLUTION,   LIFE  AND  MIND  273 

nonexistent.  The  differences  between  truth  and  error,  good  and 
evil,  happiness  and  unhappiness,  success  and  failure,  often  turn 
on  what,  viewed  quantitatively,  are  very  slight  matters;  but  the 
differences,  in  terms  of  meaning  and  consequence,  may  be  tre- 
mendous. For  life,  action  and  feeling,  differences  are,  as  a  rule, 
more  important  than  resemblances.  The  same  is  true  for  the 
interpretation  of  the  evolution  process. 

The  actual  world  is  a  dynamic  interplay  of  mutually  adaptive 
energy  centers.  It  is  due,  in  its  present  phase,  to  the  interplay  in 
the  past  of  energy  centers  ("monads").  The  mutual  adaptations 
of  plants  and  animals  and  their  environments ;  the  interactions  of 
organisms ;  the  influences  of  soil,  water,  and  climate  on  organisms ; 
the  influences  of  organisms  on  the  soil,  water,  and  probably  even 
on  climate: — all  these  are  cases  of  dynamic  interrelationship  that 
transcend  the  categories  of  mere  mechanism.  We  are  not  to  seek 
the  evidence  for  the  dominance  of  livingness  and  its  teleological 
efficacy,  in  the  sense  of  its  power  of  increasing  subjugation  of 
inorganic  energies  to  the  maintenance  and  enhancement  of  life,  in 
any  partial  or  special  features  in  the  evolution  process.  The  best 
evidence  for  an  immanent  teleology  is  to  be  found  in  the  whole 
system  of  dynamic  and  organic  interrelatedness  of  the  factors  in 
evolution;  and  in  the  presence  of  a  continuous  thread  or  trend 
which,  interwoven  with  the  stuff  of  life,  in  the  ceaselessly  working 
loom  of  time,  displays  its  pattern  more  clearly  with  the  movement 
of  the  ages.  The  pattern  is  the  growth  and  maintenance  of  indi- 
viduality in  association — the  trend  of  the  evolution  process  towards 
'personality. 

The  Darwinians  hold  that  natural  selection,  of  those  chance 
variations  in  the  structure  and  functions  of  organs  which  fit  their 
fortunate  possessors  to  survive  in  the  struggle  for  existence,  is  the 
chief  method  of  organic  evolution.  Most  of  them  admit  other 
factors,  such  as  sexual  selection;  and  some  of  them  admit,  to  a 
limited  extent,  the  inheritance  of  the  effects  of  use  and  disuse. 
Either  they  do  not  attempt  to  account  for  the  origin  of  variations, 
or  they  assume  that  the  origin,  as  well  as  the  selection,  of  variations 
is  due  to  the  action  of  the  physical  environment.  The  intraorganic 
factors  are  the  products  of  the  extraorganic  factors.  The  organism 
throughout  its  history  is  thus  the  passively  moulded  product  of 
physical  forces. 

The  direct  stimulus  of  the  environment  alone  does  not  account 


274  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

for  the  origin  and  cumulative  persistence  of  the  most  significant 
variations.  Organisms  are  not  copies  or  replicas  of  the  environ- 
ment, for  their  adaptive  responses  to  external  stimuli  are  very 
diversified  and  often  complicated.  Moreover,  as  Bergson  has  so 
effectively  pointed  out  in  his  discussion  of  the  eyes  of  the  molluscs 
and  vertebrates,  organs  differing  in  structure  but  similar  in  func- 
tion have  been  developed  along  quite  divergent  lines  of  evolution.6 

An  organ  such  as  the  eye  represents  very  manifold  and  complex 
delicately  adjusted  correlations.  The  whole  organism  of  a  higher 
mammal  is  a  marvelously  complex  machine.  That  these  correla- 
tions could  have  resulted  from  the  chance  persistence  of  chance 
combinations  in  the  blind  permutations  and  combinations  of  mass 
particles  is  improbable.  A  much  coarser  machine  fashioned  in 
human  society  implies  an  end.  Why  not  then  the  whole  infinitely 
complex  adjustments  and  correlations  of  organisms?  The  very 
simplest  and  most  general  terms  employed  in  biology — adjustment, 
adaptation,  variation,  selection,  use,  growth — are  teleological  or 
axiological  concepts. 

Vital  evolution  has  taken  definite  directions  along  certain 
main  lines.  It  has  passed  from  the  generalized  to  the  specialized, 
from  the  homogeneous  to  the  heterogenous,  as  Herbert  Spencer 
put  it.  Evolution,  however,  has  not  been  a  simple  change  from 
the  generalized  to  the  specialized;  for  intelligence,  the  ruling 
power  in  human  evolution,  is  the  most  highly  generalized  and 
supple  instrument  for  the  production  of  specialized  adaptations 
to  be  found  in  the  whole  of  nature.  All  man's  specialization  of 
organs  are  tributary  to  the  generic  function  of  intelligence,  by 
virtue  of  which  the  latter  is  able  to  fashion  and  use  new  inventions, 
new  specialties.  Thus,  with  the  supremacy  of  intelligence,  the 
evolution  process  enters  upon  a  decidedly  new  phase.  Man,  the 
tool  maker,  becomes  the  builder  of  civilization. 

With  constancy  of  external  conditions  there  has  taken  place 
divergence  of  direction  in  organic  types,  but  not  the  indefinite  and 
chaotic  diversity  which  would  not  strike  out  and  hold  to  certain 
paths.  The  persistence  of  divergent  development  in  a  few  chan- 
nels, at  first  parallel  and  then  separating  more  widely,  is  evidence, 
both  of  an  original  power  of  individualized  responsiveness  to  the 
external  situation,  and  of  a  capacity  to  hold  to  and  enhance  the 


Bergson,  Creative  Evolution,  Chaps.  1  and  2. 


EVOLUTION,  LIFE  AND  MIND  275 

kinds  of  response  already  made.  Vital  evolution  is  ortho genetic, 
in  the  general  sense  that  it  displays  the  persistence  of  specific 
directions.  That  this  orthogenesis  is  not  the  mechanical  result  of 
the  moulding  power  of  the  environment  seems  to  be  shown  by  the 
varied  character  of  this  persistence  of  direction.  Moreover,  the 
mere  fact  of  variation  does  not  account  for  the  survival  and  trans- 
mission of  variations  in  enhanced  degree ;  such  that  they  become 
important  factors  in  the  survival  of  their  possessors.  In  order  that 
correlated  variations  may  become  useful  they  must  first  be  there 
and  persist.  What  preserves  the  organism  before  the  variations  in 
question  have  become  useful  weapons  in  the  struggle,  and  what 
enables  a  succession  of  generations  to  add  their  mites  of  increase 
to  these  same  variations  ?  Finally,  there  are  many  variations 
which  seem  to  be  without  any  purely  survival  value,  such  as  rich 
coloration,  and  a  multitude  of  minor  variations  in  structure  and 
ornamentation  of  organisms.  Of  what  survival  value  are  all  the 
songs,  colors,  and  activities  of  birds  ?  Life  seems  very  prodigal 
in  its  manifestations  of  formative  energy. 

In  man  there  is  still  a  more  abundant  outcrop  of  seemingly 
useless  variations,  such  as  his  play,  aesthetic,  and  speculative  im- 
pulses. These  are  doubtless  useful,  in  the  long  run  and  in  the 
highest  sense,  by  enhancing  the  dignity  and  value  of  his  social  and 
spiritual  life,  but  they  are  without  survival  value  in  the  physical 
struggle  for  individual  existence.  If  the  one  ruling  principle  of 
vital  evolution  be  the  mechanical  moulding  of  organisms  by  en- 
vironmental forces,  these  qualities  are  unaccountable  miracles. 

Progressive  adaptation,  by  which  organisms  gain  the  power  in 
increasing  degree  to  dominate  the  environment,  is  a  teleological 
principle ;  no  matter  how  in  detail  this  adaptation  may  be  achieved. 
The  details  may  be  susceptible  of  mechanical  statement,  may  have 
become  habit  mechanisms;  but  the  whole  movement  is  supra- 
mechanical.  Useful  variations  originate,  doubtless  evoked  some- 
how by  the  demands  of  the  environment  on  organisms  to  maintain 
themselves ;  but  the  power  of  response  in  a  diversity  of  ways,  some 
of  which  are  cumulative  and  persistent,  implies  teleological  activ- 
ity in  the  organism;  not  a  force  that  works  unerringly,  but  one 
that  achieves  its  ends  by  the  trial  and  error  method.  Teleology  in 
this  general  sense  by  no  means  implies  conscious  design  or  purpose. 
It  does  imply  persistent  striving  in  definite  directions  towards 
individuality,   and  this  striving  does  eventuate  finally,  through 


276  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

specific  physico-chemical  combinations,  in  sentient  selfhood,  in  pre- 
visional  adjustment  to  and  reshaping  of  the  environment.  Mech- 
anism is  everywhere  present  and  nowhere  the  final  interpretation. 
There  is  an  immanent  cosmic  teleology  operating  in  organisms. 

IV.    Life  and  Matter 

Does  vital  evolution  exhibit  the  working  out  of  a  single  pre- 
designed plan  ?  The  diversities,  wastes,  failures,  monstrosities  of 
life  negative  such  an  assumption.  Bergson  has  pointed  out  that 
the  error  of  radical  finalism  is  to  assume  that  the  whole  is  given 
at  one  blow  as  a  timeless  actuality  and  that,  by  consequence,  every 
step  in  the  process  is  predetermined.  Such  a  notion  makes  it 
inconceivable  why  there  should  be  any  evolution  or  any  imperfec- 
tions in  the  life  process.  Why  should  not  the  whole  order  of  life 
have  appeared  and  continued  complete  and  perfect  ?  His  own 
theory  seems  to  be  that  matter  is  the  negative  or  obstructive  factor 
in  the  evolution  of  life,  an  assemblage  of  obstacles  which  the  life 
force  must  overcome  in  order  to  progress.  Life  is  a  finite  impetus 
which  must  insinuate  itself  in  matter,  must  compromise  and  use 
evasive  and  circuitous  methods,  in  order  to  surmount  the  obstacles 
presented  to  it  by  matter.  Actual  evolution  is  the  result  of  this 
struggle  between  life  and  matter.  The  vital  impetus  persistently 
experiments  with  ways  and  means  to  get  itself  forward  and  upward 
against  the  downward  pull  of  matter.  On  the  other  hand  he  some- 
times treats  matter,  that  is,  spatial  extension,  as  if  it  were  a  by- 
product of  life  itself.  The  dualism  is  put  into  the  vital  impetus. 
Thus  self-diremption  or  dialectic  is  conceived  to  dwell  in  the  very 
heart  of  life  and  to  move  it  from  within. 

This  dualistic  conception  of  the  relation  of  life  and  matter  I 
find  unsatisfactory.  Firstly,  it  seems  to  imply  that  the  obstruc- 
tiveness  of  matter  is  the  chief  cause  of  individual  and  racial  varia- 
tion  and  of  death.  Life  without  matter  would  then  have  been  one 
immense  and  changeless  ocean  of  being.  Its  impulse  towards 
individuality  and  effort  derives  from  life's  being  blocked  or 
hemmed  in  by  matter.  Thus  the  one  cosmic  soul  is  fragmented 
into  the  multitude  of  finite  individual  souls,  each  freighted  with 
a  bit  of  the  vital  urge  (Velan  vital).  It  is  really  a  negative  con- 
ception of  the  function  of  matter.  It  does  not  differ,  in  principle, 
from  the  Platonic-Aristotelian  concept  of  matter  as  the  partially 


EVOLUTION,   LIFE  AND   MIND  277 

hindering  condition,  which  is  also  the  potency  of  individual  exist- 
ences. I  do  not  think  that  death  is  a  triumph  of  matter  over  life. 
It  appears  rather  to  be,  in  large  measure,  at  least,  the  result  of 
the  struggle  of  life  with  life — of  the  more  complex  forms  of  life 
with  the  simpler.  The  germ  theory  of  disease  supports  the  latter 
view.  It  may  be,  however,  that  normally  death,  in  the  higher 
organisms,  such  as  man,  is  but  a  change  of  material  investiture, 
a  critical  phase  of  development.  The  old  body,  no  longer  adequate, 
may  be  left  to  the  simpler  organisms  to  use  up. 

Secondly,  carbon,  hydrogen,  oxygen,  nitrogen,  phosphorus  and 
sulphur  are  the  direct  material  potentialities  of  life.  Other  chem- 
ical substances  further  life.  The  physical  environment  is  fitted  to 
be  the  theater  of  vital  evolution  in  a  positive  sense.  It  is  a  plati- 
tude to  say  that  the  fact  that  organisms  exist  and  multiply  estab- 
lishes the  fitness  of  the  material  environment. 

Thirdly,  matter  is  not  in  itself  a  sufficient  explanation  of 
variation  and  individuality;  and  the  increase  of  individuality  is 
the  meaning  of  evolution.  My  own  view  is  that  matter  is  the 
positive  potentiality  of  vital  organization.  Matter  in  itself  prob- 
ably consists  of  simple  and  relatively  unorganized  centers  of 
activity.  The  forms  of  individuation  intermediate  between  unor- 
ganized matter  and  living  organisms,  such  as  the  crystal,  represent 
the  first  steps  towards  organization.  Vital  evolution  is  the  organ- 
ization of  more  complex  individuals  from  these  simpler  centers  of 
activity. 

There  are  three  levels  of  individuation.  (1)  The  mere  par- 
ticulce  or  individua  of  the  physical  universe.  These  are  the  dis- 
crete elements  of  matter — electrons  or  other  unit  centers  of 
physical  activity.  But  physical  individua  are  not  true  individuals. 
They  are  meeting  points  of  general  relations  or  centers  of  inter- 
ference in  the  flux  of  physical  forces.  Gravitational  and  electrical 
attraction,  the  lines  and  fields  of  force  of  magnetic  and  electrical 
theory,  are  phenomena  of  this  general  relationship.  Physical  indi- 
vidua are  centers  of  activity,  but  their  centrality  is  subordinate 
and  their  individuality  poor  and  abstract.  They  are  discrete  units 
or  differentiations  in  a  continuous  medium — the  ether,  or  what- 
ever may  take  the  place  of  the  ether  in  order  to  afford  a  con- 
ceptual basis  for  the  dynamical  interrelations  of  physical  elements. 
Physical  individua  are  but  eddies  in  the  stream  of  physical 
becoming.    Their  natures  are  exhausted  in  their  external  relation- 


278  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

ships.    They  have  only  being-for-another  no  being-for-self ,  no  self- 
maintaining  center  of  individuality. 

(2)  The  living  organism  more  nearly  approaches  true  indi- 
viduality. It  has  greater  complexity  and  unity  of  structure  and 
function  than  a  physical  individuum.  It  has  the  beginnings  of 
being-for-self,  of  self-related  and  self-maintaining  individuality. 
Anabolism,  self-movement,  irritability  and  sensitivity,  are  phenom- 
ena of  individual  self -maintenance.  Reproduction,  and  death  are 
phenomena  of  relationship  and  dependence  of  the  individual  on 
the  species  and  the  environment.7  The  organism  uses  the  physical 
individua  which  are  its  components,  to  develop  more  individuality. 
All  its  forces  and  elements  are  chemical  and  physical,  but  its  power 
of  rearrangement  and  synthesis  of  these  elements  shows  that  it  is 
a  higher  and  more  complex  individual  unity.  It  develops  highly 
differentiated  structures  which  function  as  an  integrated  whole. 
The  essence  of  the  organism  is  organizing  individuality.8  Yet  a 
mere  organism  is  not  a  true  self.  The  constituent  cells  and  tissues 
are  easily  thrown  off  or  grafted  onto  other  organisms.  The  cells 
have  a  relatively  large  amount  of  independence.  In  reproduction 
the  individual  organism  shows  its  dependence  on  the  species  or 
type.  The  self-maintaining  power  of  the  organism,  its  organizing 
principle  of  synthesis,  seems  to  stand  in  a  relatively  external  rela- 
tion to  its  constituent  elements.  The  protozoa  are  vague  and  fluid 
unities,  and  even  the  higher  metazoa  are  communities  of  individua 
which  are  not  wholly  merged  in  the  unity  of  the  individual.  The 
evolution  of  organisms  is  a  progress  in  individuation,  in  that  its 
successive  steps  are  stages  in  increasing  domination  of  the  en- 
vironment, in  a  change  from  relative  passivity  to  greater  relative 
activity  and  self-assertion.  Contrast  an  amoeba  with  a  civilized 
man  in  this  respect.  The  domination  of  the  environment  has  been 
accomplished  through  the  growth  of  the  sensori-motor  system  cul- 
minating in  the  development  of  the  cerebral  nervous  system,  the 
instrument  for  the  control  of  more  remote  environmental  relations 
in  time  and  space. 

(3)  Mind  alone  is  capable  of  full  individuality  or  selfhood. 

TC/.  Hegel  on  Life,  Wallace's  Logic  of  Hegel,  pp.  358  ff. 

8  The  doctrine  that  the  organism  is  an  individual  whole  and  that  life  is 
eternal  is  developed  in  a  very  interesting  fashion  in  the  recent  work  by 
Professor  W.  E.  Bitter,  The  Unity  of  the  Organism.  I  am  not  clear  as  to 
whether  he  regards  consciousness  as  coeval  with  the  organism  or  a  product  of 
certain  causal  interactions  between  the  organism  and  the  environment. 


1/    w 

EVOLUTION,   LIFE  AND  MIND   j  279 

It  supervenes  upon  and  uses  the  bodily  organism  as  its  locus  of 
operation.  Mind  is  the  most  intimate  and  integrated  type  of 
totality.  Its  elements  have  no  existence  apart  from  the  unity. 
Mind  is  at  once  capable  of  very  great  complexity  of  structure  and 
of  a  corresponding  integrity  of  operation.  Whereas,  physical  indi- 
vidua  seem  but  abstract  meeting  points  of  general  relations  or 
forces,  and  whereas,  in  organisms  the  balance  between  the  indi- 
viduum  or  principle  of  synthesis  and  the  dependence  of  its  con- 
stituent elements  and  functions  on  the  relationship  to  the  environ- 
ment is  so  unstable  that  the  organism  is  ever  on  the  point  of 
dissolution  into  physical  elements,  mind  is  a  creative  as  well  as 
irradiating  center  of  relationships,  by  virtue  of  which  it  dominates 
not  only  the  immediate  environment  but  controls  to  a  large  degree 
the  more  remote  environment — the  spatial  relations  in  the  distance 
and  the  temporal  sequences  bound  up  with  these  more  distant 
connections.  Thus  a  mind  alone  has  true  individuality,  has  being- 
in-and-for-self.  It  maintains  itself  by  expanding  into  a  fuller 
focus  for  cosmic  relationships,  and  it  enriches  its  being  in  depth 
by  union  with  other  minds. 

Evolution  is  the  process  by  which  individual  "souls"  are 
fashioned.  The  successive  levels  which  we  have  just  considered 
are  the  main  stages  in  the  making  of  souls.  The  relatively  bare 
individuality  of  physical  force  centers  is  the  precondition  of  the 
living  organism,  which  arises  through  the  synthesis  of  a  specific 
complex  of  physical  centers.  Whether  every  low-grade  organism 
is  sentient  or  not  it  is  not  possible  to  say  definitely.  But  certainly 
organic  irritability  or  sensitivity  is  the  precondition  of  sentience. 
It  is  probable  that  the  high  tension  created  by  the  concentration 
and  association  of  avenues  and  centers  of  organic  irritability 
through  a  nervous  system  gives  rise  to  sentience.  The  latter  was 
at  first  evanescent,  a  momentary  and  fleeting  consciousness  with- 
out memory  or  reflection  It  became  more  definitely  organized, 
as  the  sense  organs  and  centers  were  differentiated  and  coordinated 
with  the  instinctive  motor  reactions.  As  yet  there  was  not  a  true 
self.  There  was  soul,  but  no  self.  The  biological  soul  life,  once 
organized  and  developing  into  greater  complexity  and  significance, 
as  instrument  of  organic  adaptation  and  domination  of  the  environ- 
ment, became  a  continuous  and  expanding  factor  in  evolution. 
The  temporal  continuity  of  psychical  life,  in  the  succession  of  the 
generations,  is  a  highly  warranted  hypothesis,  which  accounts  for 


/ 


280  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

the  facts  of  psychical  heredity.  The  elementary  psychical  varia- 
tions in  individuals  and  species  are  probably  due  to  the  new  com- 
binations of  psychical  capacity  ever  being  struck  out  by  conjuga- 
tion. This  inheritance  of  psychical  unit  characters,  in  the  shape 
of  instinct,  impulse,  and  power  of  discrimination  of  the  senses, 
and  the  activity  and  persistence  of  higher  tendencies,  which  com- 
bine through  crossing  to  produce  a  rich  variety  of  temperaments  or 
original  natures  in  individuals,  I  do  not  doubt  to  be  the  natural 
basis  of  the  human  soul.  Everyone  who  has  studied  the  psychical 
resemblances  of  individuals  to  their  ancestors  has  collected  evi- 
dences that  personalities,  even  of  the  more  creative  types,  may 
largely  be  accounted  for  by  the  fortunate  combinations  of  ancestral 
qualities  which  were  isolated  in  their  parents,  grandparents  or 
more  remote  ancestors.9  Goethe's  well-known  words  have  often 
been  cited  in  this  connection : 

Vom  Vater  hab'  Ich  die  Statur 
Des  Leben's  ernstes  Fuehren 
Vom  Mutter chen  die  Frohnatur 
Urn  Lust  zu  fdbulieren. 

The  case  of  the  "Jukes,"  a  race  of  degenerates  on  the  one  hand, 
and  the  descendants  of  Jonathan  Edwards  on  the  other  hand,  are 
striking  evidences  in  point.10 

There  is  more  in  the  true  self  or  person  than  an  inherited 
complex  of  psychical  tendencies.  Thus  far  "Die  Theile  habt  Ihr 
i  in  der  Hand,  fehlt  leider  nur  das  geistige  Band."  These  tend- 
encies are  fused  in  the  alembic  of  the  "spirit"  or  principle  of 
intellectual  synthesis,  which  is  the  source  of  memory,  analytic 
reflection,  creative  mental  synthesis  and  rational  will.  The 
rational  principle,  which  uses  and  controls  the  inherited  tendencies 
of  the  biological  soul  life,  cannot  be  derived  from  the  latter.  It 
is  the  creative  principle  of  self-activity  which  functions  in  and 
through  the  biological  soul  and  fashions  the  latter  into  a  person- 
ality.   This  is  the  moral  and  rational  "spirit"  or  selfhood. 

Souls,  then,  are  indeed  fashioned  in  the  creative  process  of 
evolution.  Biological  souls,  through  the  operation  of  the  "higher" 
principle  of  creative  synthesis,  become  rational  selves.  Whence  is 
this  creative  principle  derived?     Here  one  reaches  the  limits  of 


9  The  Mendelian  theory  of  heredity,  of  course,  supports  this  view. 

10  Walter,  Genetics,  Chap.  11. 


EVOLUTION,   LIFE  AND  MIND  281 

experience  and  can  only  conjecture.  The  birth,  from  out  the 
biological  soul,  of  a  rational  and  moral  spirit  or  person  points  to 
the  hypothesis  that  here  one  finds  in  the  realm  of  the  finite  a 
principle  which  transcends  the  finite;  in  the  evolution  of  life  the 
self-expression  of  an  ultimate  spiritual  and  cosmic  power  which 
transcends  the  evolutionary  process  and  yet  is  implicated  in  every 
step  thereof.  This  hypothesis  is  akin  to  the  view  as  to  the  origin 
and  destiny  of  spirit  advanced  by  religious  and  philosophical 
geniuses,  that  the  spirit  in  man  is  the  self-manifestation  of  the 
Divine  Spirit,  that  thus  the  supreme  cosmic  spirit  imparts  himself 
in  very  truth  to  the  soul  of  man.  The  "natural"  man,  that  is,  the 
biological  man  becomes,  through  the  communication  of  this  Divine 
Spark,  a  moral  and  rational  self.  In  Leibniz'  words  spiritual 
monads  are  born  by  continuous  fulgurations  from  the  Divinity. 

Friendless  was  the  Mighty  Lord  of  Worlds, 

Felt  defect — therefore  created  Spirits 

Blessed  mirrors  of  His  blessedness, 

From  the  chalice  of  the  world  of  souls 

Foams  for  Him  now  infinitude. — Schiller,  Friendship. 

The  evolution  process  is  the  striving  of  a  vast  multitude  of 
individual  centers  with  increasing  individuation  and  association, 
progressing  from  blind  self -maintenance  and  reproduction  to 
rational  self-determination.  The  failures,  wastes,  blind  alleys, 
which  life  so  often  leads  into,  result  from  the  fact  that  the  system 
of  animate  nature  is  an  open  and  developing  system  of  individ- 
uated centers  capable  of  effort  and  progress.  If  it  be  asked  why 
the  growth  of  life  must  take  place  in  this  way,  why  it  should  not 
be  the  placid  unfolding  of  a  perfectly  predetermined  plan,  the  only 
answer  at  hand  is  that  growth  through  trial  and  error,  and  by 
effort,  is  the  one  way  in  which  we  can  think  the  evolution  of  a 
world  which  brings  forth  ever  enriching  individuality,  as  it  is  the 
one  way  in  which  we  can  think  the  education  of  an  individual. 

In  the  human  order  mind  becomes  the  dominant  factor  in  the 
life  system.  It  fashions  the  world  of  social  and  historical  experi- 
ence and  tradition.  Mind  is  the  parent  of  language,  industrial 
advance,  the  arts,  manners,  morals,  sciences,  and  religions;  by 
virtue  of  these,  man's  evolution  becomes  a  cultural  and  purposive 
process  which  creates  and  maintains  enjoyed  values,  in  contrast 
with  the  blind  striving,  towards  value,  of  subhuman  nature.    Thus 


282  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

personality  is  the  end  term  in  the  evolutionary  process.  Thus  the 
physical  order  is  made  the  servant  of  the  type  of  being  who  seems 
to  have  emerged  from  its  own  bosom. 

That  which  makes  the  evolution  process  more  than  a  bare  suc- 
cession of  atomic  and  jarring  events  is  the  continuity  of  its  ever 
increasing  movement  towards  personality.  When  one  speaks  of 
the  evolution  of  the  stellar  cosmos,  describe  its  elements  and  suc- 
cessive features  how  one  may,  the  total  meaning  of  the  process  is 
that  its  earlier  and  more  chaotic  conditions  have  eventuated  in  a 
cosmos.  Cosmos  could  hardly  have  come  from  apparent  chaos 
unless  there  was  order  or  definite  tendency  at  work  in  the  chaos. 
What  we  commonly  call  chaos  is  only  a  different  sort  or  phase  of 
order.11 

The  determining  factors  of  organic  evolution  have  full  mean- 
ing only  as  contributing  elements  in  a  process  which  is  continuous 
and  significant  in  what  it  brings  forth.  Certain  values  are  at- 
tained, and  the  process  passes  through  these  to  the  achievement  of 
still  richer  values.  The  biologist  may  disclaim  any  attempt  to  pass 
judgment  on  the  values  achieved  in  the  process  of  evolution.  He 
may  say  that  man  is  not  necessarily  in  any  sense  of  value  a  higher 
animal  than  an  amoeba,  but  only  a  more  complex  organism,  with 
more  structures  and  functions  and  hence  more  troubles.  But  the 
biologist,  nevertheless,  does  and  must  regard  man  as  better 
equipped  biologically  for  adjustment,  self-maintenance,  and  self- 
development  than  an  amoeba,  and  when  he  pursues,  with  utter 
devotion,  his  science,  he  tacitly  at  least,  admits  that  the  life  of  a 
civilized  thinking  being  is  of  more  worth  than  the  life  of  a  jelly- 
fish. Biologically  man  is  the  highest  animal  because,  in  Professor 
Sherrington's  words,  he  is  best  fitted  to  dominate  his  environ- 
ment.12 This  domination  becomes  in  turn  the  biological  basis  for 
the  attainment  of  the  spiritual  life,  the  life  of  truly  human  culture 
which  means  the  re-creation  of  the  environment  under  the  guid- 
ance of  humanistic  values. 

The  single  thread  of  continuity  or  meaning,  then,  which  binds 
together  the  successive  stages  of  evolution  is  the  emergence  and 
increasing  dominance  of  personal  spirit  or  mind  as  the  true  home 
of  values.    Nature  is  the  prelude  to  culture.     Material  and  vital 

11  Cf.  Bergson,  Creative  Evolution,  Chap.  3. 

12  C.  S.  Sherrington.  The  Integrative  Action  of  the  Central  Nervous 
/System. 


EVOLUTION,  LIFE  AND  MIND  283 

evolution  are  the  overtures  to  man's  realization  of  personality,  by 
the  organization  and  development  of  social  cultural  life.     That 
the  great  epic  of  personality  is  as  yet  only  imperfectly  unfolded 
constitutes  not  a  ground  for  pessimism  but  for  hope.    The  process 
is  a  slow  and  severe  one,  but  when  man  casts  his  reflective  gaze 
backwards  he  may  well  be  cheered  and  nerved  to  his  great  tasks  by 
the  long  vista  of  progress  behind  him.    It  is  a  possibility  so  remote 
and  unimaginable  that  we  may  intelligently  reject  it,  to  suppose 
that  the  entire  evolution  process,  with  its  eventuation  in  spiritual 
culture,  is  simply  and  solely  the  result  of  a  blind  and  contingent 
rearrangement  of  mass  particles  in  space.     If  it  is  difficult  to 
conceive  that  Plato's  philosophy  or  Shakespeare's  dramas  could 
have  occurred  accidentally  by  the  chance  coincidence  of  the  letters 
of  the  Greek  or  English  alphabets,  it  is  vastly  more  difficult  to  con- 
ceive that  the  continuity  of  order,  direction,  and  outcome  of  the 
whole  evolutionary  process  can  have  been  the  result  of  blind  chance. 
Whereas  in  human  activity  purpose  means  a  foreseen  and 
consciously   willed   end,   in   a  very   large  fraction   of  biological 
processes  there  seems  to  be  no  clear  evidence  of  conscious  foresight. 
Are  we  then  to  admit  unconscious  teleology  ?    It  seems  to  me  that 
we  must  regard  unconscious  teleology,  the  unconscious  achieve- 
ment of  values,  as  playing  a  very  considerable  role  in  nature.    The 
great  bulk  of  organic  functions,  such  as  metabolism,  the  circulation 
and  aeration  of  the  blood,  the  summation  of  stimuli  in  the  sense 
organs  and  cortical  centers,  are  normally  performed  without  con- 
sciousness.    These  functions   are  certainly  teleological  in  their 
results.     There  are  many  instinctive  psychical  tendencies  which 
begin  without  foresight,  although  they  may  be  accompanied  by 
consciousness.     Such  are  the  self-preservative  reactions  of  anger, 
fear,  simulation.     Again  there  are  the  secondarily  automatic  or 
habitual  modes  of  action  which  are  acquired  with  consciousness, 
but  are  afterwards  performed  unconsciously;  for  example,  walk- 
ing, running,  and,  in  general,  operations  involving  manual  skill. 
Perhaps,  as  some  genetic  psychologists  hold,13  all  organic  move- 
ments were  originally  accompanied  by  consciousness.     At  any 
rate  there  is  no  inherent  difficulty  in  the  conception  of  uncon- 
sciously useful  and  end-realizing  activities.     Even  rational  man 
often  finds  that  the  ends  at  which  he  consciously  aimed  were  not 

11  Wilhelm  Wundt,  for  example. 


284  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

the  true  ends  of  his  activities,  and,  in  failing  to  achieve  his  pur- 
poses as  he  planned  them,  he  has  accomplished  larger  and  worthier 
ends. 

The  lower  animal  organisms  and  plants  are  probably  devoid  of 
any  foresight  of  the  ends  of  their  activities. 

The  older  theories  of  creative  intelligence,  which  made  the 
world  and  wound  it  up  like  a  perpetual  and  vastly  intricate  clock- 
work, and  which  intervened  in  the  world  process  only  on  special 
occasions  to  work  out  some  particular  aim  or  make  some  improve- 
ment which  has  arisen  in  the  Divine  Mind  as  an  afterthought 
consequent  upon  an  unforeseen  derangement  of  the  cosmical  ma- 
chines, are  thoroughly  discredited.     The  notion  of  a  special  provi- 
dence which,  for  example,  answers  prayers  for  rain  or  for  succor 
from  natural  catastrophes  by  disturbing  the  causal  sequences  of 
nature,  or  which  punishes  the  wickedness  of  a  St.  Pierre  or  a 
Messina  by  an  earthquake  and  volcanic  eruption,  is  incompatible 
with  the  conception  of  the  system  of  nature  as  an  orderly  whole. 
The  immanent  purposiveness  of  nature  consists  in  the  systematic 
totality  and  continuity  of  life-realizing  capacities,14  possessed  and 
exercised  by  its  individual  members.    This  does  not  mean  that  the 
entire  order  of  nature  may  not  be  the  self-expression  of  a  Creative 
Activity  which  transcends  nature.     Of  this,  more  anon.     In  the 
system  of  nature  only  conscious  individuals  are  values-in-them- 
selves,    since  only    conscious    individuals    can    become    ends-for- 
themselves  and  for  one  another.     The  values  of  natural  evolution 
are  concentrated  and  summated  in  persons. 

I  have  already  referred  to  the  seeming  great  waste,  useless  suf- 
fering and  purposeless  failure  strewn  by  the  wayside  along  the 
slow  and  toilsome  pathway  of  nature's  evolution.  Why  this  im- 
mense and  never  wholly  eliminated  imperfection  of  the  process,  if 
nature  be  indeed  a  value-realizing  system  ?  I  shall  not  here  fore- 
stall what  I  shall  have  to  say  later  in  regard  to  the  specific  problem 
of  evil  in  the  life  of  man.  I  desire  now  to  point  out  in  regard  to 
this  most  general  form  of  the  question:  1.  Teleology  or  value- 
production  has  no  meaning  apart  from  the  striving  and  self- 
activity  through  which  obstacles  are  surmounted,  and  apparently 
alien  and  stubborn  materials  are  transmuted  into  instrumentalities 
of  achievement.     If  life  be  teleological,  then  life  is  impossible 

14  Cf.  Aristotle 's  Entelechies. 


EVOLUTION,   LIFE  AND  MIND  285 

without  self -activity  and  striving  against  hindrances.  2.  A  world 
of  living  individuals  is  unthinkable  without  conflict  and  striving. 
The  self-active  elements  of  this  world  interact  as  members  in  an 
inter-related  totality,  elements  in  a  self-organizing  system.  In  this 
each  must  suffer  as  well  as  act,  since  each  is  a  member  of  a  world, 
and  has  at  best  only  a  relative  independence.  And  life,  individual- 
ity, self-conscious  will  and  reason,  can  exist  only  through  purposive 
striving.  A  world  of  feeling  and  thinking  beings  without  interests 
to  be  satisfied  and  ends  to  be  willed  is  surely  unintelligible. 

Leibniz'  question — is  this  the  best  of  all  possible  worlds  ? — 
only  serves  to  throw  dust  in  our  eyes.  Any  other  world  that  may 
be  imagined  will  be  only  a  variant  of  this  one.  The  actual  world 
is  neither  the  best  nor  the  worst  of  many  possible  worlds.  Since 
it  is  actual  it  is  the  only  really  possible  world.  One  world  at  a 
time !  If  you  ask,  why  this  motley  world,  your  question  is  mean- 
ingless. "Motley's  the  garb  we  wear."  There  can  be  no  ulterior 
reason  why  the  universe,  that  is  the  organized  whole  of  existence, 
is  as  it  is.  Such  a  reason  would  imply  an  antecedent  universe,  that 
is  the  existence  of  something  before  anything  existed,  which  would 
be  the  nonexistent  ground  of  existence. 


BOOK    IV 

PERSONALITY  AND  ITS  VALUES— PHILOSOPHY 
OF  SELFHOOD  AND  SOCIETY 


CHAPTER  XXII 

THE  PROBLEM  OF  PERSONALITY 

Among  empirical  existents  human  personality  is  the  richest 
monad,  the  fullest  microcosm.  It  is  a  vortex  in  the  universal  flux. 
All  the  forces  of  the  universe  flow  through  it.  It  is  subject  to  all 
the  winds  and  tides  of  cosmic  weather ;  it  is  bestial  and  Godlike, 
compounded  of  clay  and  fire.  It  rises  from  the  slime  and  ooze  of 
the  primal  world  stuff  to  the  contemplation  of  the  stars,  to  love 
stronger  than  death,  to  creative  imaginings  of  an  ideal  world.  It 
visions  values  which,  could  they  be  realized  in  society,  would  make 
of  mankind  a  Godlike  community.  It  is  racked  by  pain  and  driven 
by  hunger  and  lust.  But  it  can  live  and  die  for  loved  ones,  for 
a  country,  for  a  cause,  for  an  illusion.  It  is  moved  by  consuming 
greed  and  can  give,  asking  nothing  in  return.  It  lives  by  bread 
but  not  by  bread  alone;  it  can  make  the  earth  a  shambles  or  a 
garden  of  peace,  justice  and  friendship.  All  the  counter  currents 
and  conflicts  of  the  universe  live  in  intensified  individuation  in 
the  soul  of  man.  Mankind  produces  a  Caligula  and  a  Jesus,  a 
Caesar  Borgia  and  a  St.  Francis,  a  gibbering  idiot  and  a  Shakes- 
peare. In  man,  the  most  complex  and  contradictory  individuation 
of  the  universal  forces,  lives  the  best  key  to  the  interpretation  of 
the  meaning  of  the  whole ;  the  best  key,  since  all  other  keys  are 
manmade,  and  man  himself  is  the  final  clew  to  all  the  partial  clews 
he  makes  or  finds. 

In  view  of  the  lack  of  agreement  in  the  use  of  the  terms  indi- 
viduality, selfhood  and  personality  and  the  corresponding  concrete 
terms  individual,  self  and  person,  I  shall  now  define  briefly  the 
sense  in  which  these  terms  are  used  by  me.  The  full  significance 
of  these  definitions  can  only  be  appreciated  by  a  consideration  of 
the  whole  drift  of  our  discussion. 

By  individual  I  mean  any  being  that  is  an  indivisible  unity  of 
diverse  parts  or  aspects  and,  hence,  in  which  the  unity  and  the 
diversity  are  interdependent.  An  individual  can  be  divided  or 
disintegrated,  but  then  it  ceases  to  be  itself ;  it  loses  its  distinctive 

289 


290  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

character  as  a  whole  and  its  individuality  cannot  be  restored.  An 
organism  is  an  individual ;  a  machine  is  not,  since  its  parts  can  be 
assembled,  taken  apart  and  reassembled.  In  a  machine  parts  of 
like  structure  can  be  substituted  at  will.  This  is  partially  true  of 
an  organism;  and  indeed,  an  organism  has  a  mechanical  basis; 
but,  in  the  latter,  the  substituted  parts  must  grow  into  the  whole. 
In  grafting  or  inserting  a  part  in  an  organism  we  are  dealing  with 
colonies  of  subindividuals.  A  living  cell  is  a  subindividual  and 
the  whole  organism  a  community  of  subindividuals.  Thus  indi- 
viduality involves  living  unity-in-diversity  or  organization,  dis- 
tinctness and  relations.  It  involves  uniqueness  of  being  and  life, 
but  not  isolation. 

In  a  broad  sense  an  individual  is  a  self,  but  I  shall  usually 
confine  the  application  of  the  term  "self"  to  conscious  individuals. 

By  person  I  shall  mean  a  well-organized  and  reflective  or 
rational  individual ;  a  being  that  is  aware  of,  and  lives  consciously 
in,  its  relations ;  that  realizes  its  life,  and  knows  itself  as  such,  as 
a  thinking  and  self-active  self,  a  responsible  center  of  thought, 
valuation  and  choice;  unique  and  having  immediate  and,  in  a 
sense,  absolute  value  as  just  this  center  of  spiritual  life,  while  the 
felt  content  and  meaning  of  this  unique  life  is  filled  up  with  sig- 
nificant thoughts  and  deeds  of  which  feeling  is  the  mother-liquor 
or  matrix.  In  short,  a  person,  while  unique  and  private  in  its 
inner  existence,  realizes  the  worth  of  true  existence  through  con- 
stantly going  beyond  or  transcending  its  mere  selfhood  and  living 
in  universal  relations  to  nature,  fellowman  and  God.  A  person 
is  a  "spirit."  It  means  the  same  as  "soul"  in  popular  usage,  when 
the  implications  of  popular  usage  are  thought  out.  A  self  is  an 
ego,  but  a  person  is  more  than  a  mere  ego.  A  person  is  an  indi- 
vidual self,  but  an  individual  self  need  not  be  an  actualized  person. 
A  self  contains  the  potentiality  of  personality. 

In  recent  objective  idealism,  notably  in  the  works  of  Messrs. 
Royce,  Bradley  and  Bosanquet,  the  term  individuality  is  used,  I 
think,  in  much  the  same  sense  as  the  term  personality  is  here  used. 
I  have  departed  from  their  usage,  on  the  ground  that  my  own  is 
more  in  harmony  with  the  development  of  the  terminology  of 
western  thought.  Through  the  history  of  western  thought,  from 
the  establishment  of  Christianity  as  a  doctrinal  system,  the  prevail- 
ing tendency  in  religious,  ethical  and  political  thought  has  been 
to  use  the  term  personality  to  designate  the  qualities  or  character- 


THE  PROBLEM   OF  PERSONALITY  291 

istics  of  the  most  all-inclusive  or  most  universal,  rational  and 
ethical  or  spiritual  individuality  or  selfhood.  The  person  is  not 
merely  unique  or  distinctive,  but  at  once  the  most  deeply  inward 
self-determining  and  worthful  and  the  most  universal  or  deeply 
and  widely  related  type  of  selfhood.  It  is  spirit ;  and,  I  may  add, 
to  speak  of  impersonal  "spirit"  seems  to  me  to  be  to  talk  nonsense.1 

I  proceed  now  to  consider  the  nature  and  relations  of  selfhood 
and  its  evolution  into  its  highest  form,  personality. 

The  following  may  be  taken,  by  way  of  introduction,  as  a  gen- 
eral characterization  of  a  conscious  self:  (1)  The  self  is  a  unity 
which  persists  through  changing  experiences.  However  much  my 
ideas  and  feelings  may  vary  from  time  to  time,  I  experience,  and, 
through  memory,  am  conscious  of  a  continuing  thread  of  self- 
identity  which  binds  these  changing  events  of  conscious  life  to- 
gether into  the  life  of  myself.  (2)  The  self  is  complex.  My  self  lives 
in,  attends  to,  and  is  controlled  by,  different  ideas  and  feelings, 
and  takes  different  attitudes  in  work  and  play,  in  business  life,  in 
the  family  circle,  in  society,  and  in  private  meditation.  (3)  The 
self  is  felt  as  a  unique  individuality.  In  normal  life  the  self- 
identities  even  of  lovers  or  intimate  friends  are  not  confused. 
Even  "two  hearts  that  beat  as  one,  two  souls  with  but  a  single 
thought"  remain  forever  two.  Two  friends  may  have  similar  ideas 
and  feelings  about  politics,  art,  religion  and  philosophy,  but  they 
do  not  thereby  become  one  self.  Damon  and  Pythias  remain  dis- 
tinct selves  to  the  end  of  the  chapter.  (4)  The  self  lives  and  is 
conscious  only  in  relation  to  other  selves  and  to  physical  things. 
We  can  frame  no  notion  of  what  a  self  would  be  which  did  not 
function,  as  conscious  being,  in  interaction  and  interpassion  with 
other  selves  and  with  a  physical  world. 

In  order  to  gain  a  fuller  insight  into  the  nature  of  the  self 
I  shall  have  recourse  to  psychological  analysis  and  to  the  facts 
of  psychophysiology  and  psychophysics.     I  shall,  moreover,  be 

1  Mr.  Clement  C.  J.  "Webb  in  his  Gifford  Lectures;  God  and  Personality, 
Lectures  ii  and  iv,  and  Divine  Personality  and  Human  Life,  Lecture 
ix,  explains  the  preference  of  Bosanquet  for  Individuality  over  Personality 
as  the  ultimate  principle  of  reality  on  the  two  grounds  that  the  juridical  and 
social  associations  of  the  term  personality  suggest  its  finitude  and  that  the 
ethical  notion  of  complete  self -surrender  implies  the  "adjectival"  or  transi- 
tional character  of  personality.  (J.  G.  Fichte  held  a  similar  view.)  Both 
these  grounds  are  contested  by  Mr.  Webb — rightly,  I  hold.  Lotze  held  that 
only  the  absolute  or  God  can  be  the  true  personality;  in  human  beings  it 
is  imperfect. 


292  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

particularly  concerned  to  insist  that,  in  order  to  form  an  adequate 
conception  of  the  self,  the  latter  must  be  interpreted  in  terms  of  its 
social  and  cultural  relationships,  and  as  an  active  center  of  valua- 
tion and  volition.  The  present  inquiry  might,  indeed,  be  called 
Metaphysics  and  Metasociology. 

What  is  the  relation  of  the  present  inquiry  to  psychology? 
This  question  cannot  be  answered  in  brief  and  categorical  fashion, 
since  there  is  no  uniform  attitude  among  psychologists,  either  as 
to  whether  there  is  a  place  in  their  science  for  the  concept  of  the 
self,  or  as  to  what  it  means  in  psychology. 

In  psychology  of  the  structural  and  analytical  type,,  which  dis- 
sects the  flux  of  concrete  conscious  processes  into  mental  elements 
(sensations,  images,  impulsions,  affections  and  abstract  ideas), 
considered  in  abstraction  from  the  owner  of  these  processes,  there 
is  no  place  for  an  enduring  and  unitary  self.  "Constituent  parts 
alone  roll  on."  There  is  no  soul.  What  the  naive  mind  calls  the 
soul  or  personality  is  an  ever  shifting  complex  of  sensations,  per- 
ceptions, feelings,  images  and  strivings. 

An  excellent  statement  of  the  standpoint  of  analytical  and 
structural  psychology  is  the  following.  Mind,  says  Titchener,2  is 
"the  sum  total  of  human  experience  considered  as  dependent  upon 
the  experiencing  person.  We  have  said,  further,  that  the  phrase 
Experiencing  person'  means  the  living  body,  the  organized  indi- 
vidual ;  and  we  have  hinted  that,  for  psychological  purposes,  the 
living  body  may  be  reduced  to  the  nervous  system  and  its  attach- 
ments. Mind  thus  becomes  the  sum  total  of  human  experience 
considered  as  dependent  upon  a  nervous  system.  And  since  human 
experience  is  always  process,  occurrence,  and  the  dependent  aspect 
of  human  experience  is  its  mental  aspect,  we  may  say,  more 
shortly,  that  mind  is  the  sum  total  of  mental  process."  "The  word 
'self,'  as  a  psychological  rubric,  means  the  particular  combination 
of  talents,  temperament,  and  character  that  makes  up  an  individual 
mind.  Self,  as  a  conscious  experience,  is  any  complex  of  mental 
processes  that  means  some  temporary  phase  of  this  combination 
and  a  self-consciousness  is  a  consciousness  in  which  the  self,  as  a 
conscious  experience,  is  focal.  It  has  certain  fairly  constant  con- 
stituents; organic  sensations,  a  visual  perception  or  idea  of  the 
body,  and  the  verbal  ideas  of  T  and  {mf."     Titchener  further 


*  Textbook  of  Psychology,  p.  16. 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  PERSONALITY  293 

says :  "the  mental  life  as  the  author  has  lived  it  is  very  intermit- 
tently personal."  3 

In  short,  from  the  standpoint  of  this  type  of  psychology  the 
so-called  mental  self  is  simply  one  occasional  and  variable  experi- 
ential complex  in  the  total  flow  of  consciousness,  and  it  consists 
chiefly  of  organic  sensations.  The  belief  in  a  unitary  and  per- 
sistent principle  of  selfhood  is  either  to  be  regarded  as  a  survival 
of  the  inaccuracies  of  common  sense  thinking;  or,  if  it  have  any 
place  in  more  rigorous  thinking,  that  place  is  in  metaphysics. 

A  psychology  which  sets  out  to  analyze  the  concrete  mental  life 
into  a  complex  of  sensational  and  affectional  elements,  must,  as 
Hume  would  say,  ask  in  regard  to  every  concept,  including  that 
of  the  self — "produce  me  the  corresponding  impression !"  This  is 
a  legitimate  procedure.  A  philosopher  can  have  no  quarrel  with 
any  psychologist's  right  thus  to  circumscribe  and  isolate  the  area 
and  method  of  his  investigations,  provided  only  that  the  psychol- 
ogist sticks  to  his  last,  and  does  not  assume  that  his  is  the  only 
justifiable  procedure  in  dealing  with  the  self.  This  type  of  psy- 
chology accepts  nothing  as  a  datum  which  cannot  be  analyzed  out 
as  a  particular  element  in  an  empirical  conscious  complex.  It 
seeks  the  sensational,  affective  and  imaginistic  elements  of  mind 
and  the  laws  of  their  coexistence  and  succession.  In  the  next  chap- 
ter I  shall  try  to  show  that  a  psychology  of  this  type  is,  by  its  very 
starting  point  and  method,  shut  out  from  an  adequate  conception 
of  the  self. 

The  functional  type  of  psychology  lays  stress  on  the  activities 
and  uses  of  consciousness  in  the  development  and  maintenance  of 
life.  The  processes  of  sensation,  perception,  imagination,  judg- 
ment, inference,  memory,  impulse,  emotion,  and  so  forth,  are  re- 
garded as  instruments  for  conserving  and  enhancing  the  life  of  the 
individual  and  of  the  species  in  their  biological  and  social  relation- 
ships.4 The  mind  of  man  is  viewed  as  a  weapon  in  the  struggle 
for  existence,  an  instrument  of  biological  adaptation  to  environ- 
ment, engendered  in  the  evolution  process  through  causes  still,  in 
large  part,  unknown.  The  evolutionary  and  functional  standpoint 
has  thrown  very  valuable  light  on  the  place  of  consciousness  in  the 
natural  order.     In  estimating  the  biological  significance  of  con- 

'Ioid.,  pp.  544,  545. 

4  Win.  James,  Principles  of  Psychology;  John  Dewey,  The  Influence  of 
Darwin  and  Other  Essays. 


294  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

sciousness  it  must,  however,  be  borne  in  mind  that  the  life  which 
consciousness  thus  serves  is  the  life  of  mind  itself,  conscious 
and  rational  life,  not  mere  animal  existence.  Hence  mind  is,  in 
one  sense,  the  end  or  aim  of  its  own  functioning.  Conscious  life 
at  its  higher  levels  functions  for  itself.  Being  an  instrument 
which  enjoys  its  own  functioning,  mind  strives  to  enhance  and 
conserve  the  affective  values  of  its  own  operations  as  ends-in-them- 
selves.  To  have  overlooked  this  truth  is  the  cardinal  error  of  the 
crasser  forms  of  utilitarianism  in  ethics  and  social  philosophy. 

A  third  type  of  psychology,  which  insists  on  the  central  impor- 
tance of  the  self  for  psychological  investigation,  has  been  called 
"self -psychology."  5  Psychologists  of  this  type  insist  that  con- 
scious processes  always  belong  to  an  individual,  and  that  to  ignore 
this  fundamental  principle  is  to  distort  the  facts  with  which  psy- 
chology deals.  It  will  become  evident,  as  we  proceed,  that  the 
standpoint  of  the  present  work  is  very  close  to  that  of  the  self- 
psychology.  Indeed,  in  so  far  as  the  present  volume  is  concerned 
with  the  analysis  and  description  of  human  nature,  its  standpoint 
is  the  same  as  that  of  a  broadly  conceived  self-psychology.  All 
structural  analysis  is  analysis  of  the  nature  of  psychical  individ- 
uals, and  all  functional  interpretations  of  mental  processes  must 
have  reference  to  these  processes  as  functions  of  human  indi- 
viduality. 

Recently,  considerable  attention  has  been  given  to  the  methods 
of  determining  the  psychological  variations  of  individuals,  of  de- 
fining the  chief  significant  types  of  individuality,  and  of  describing 
more  accurately  the  psychical  life  of  individuals  in  terms  of  these 
variations.  The  name  "differential  psychology"  is  given  to  this 
field.  It  is  as  yet  only  in  its  infancy,  but  it  stands  in  the  very 
closest  relation  to  our  present  inquiry.  In  fact,  differential  psy- 
chology is  concerned,  in  its  larger  aspects,  precisely  with  the  em- 
pirical groundwork  for  a  philosophy  of  selves.6 


B  M.  W.  Calkins,  An  Introduction  to  Psychology,  and  A  First  Boole  in 
Psychology,  1910;  "Psychology  as  Science  of  Self";  Journal  of  Philosophy, 
Psychology,  and  Scientific  Methods,  Vol.  v,  1908,  pp.  12  ff.,  64  ff.,  113  ff. 
W.  Stern,  Person  und  Sache,  I;  James  Ward,  article  "Psychology,"  En- 
cyclopaedia Britannica,  11th  edition,  Vol.  XXII;  the  same  author,  Psychological 
Principles. 

•  The  most  systematic  treatment,  thus  far,  of  individual  psychology  is 
W.  Stern's  Bifferentielle  Psychologie,  Leipzig,  1911.  See  also,  W.  Dilthey, 
Beitrdge  sum  Studium  der  Individualitdt.     Akad-Ber.,  Berlin,  1896,  pp.  295- 


THE  PROBLEM   OF  PERSONALITY  295 

Lately  a  professedly  new  type  of  psychology  has  come  into 
being  calling  itself  "behaviorism."  Psychology  is  defined  as  the 
science  of  human  and  animal  behavior.  The  radical  behaviorist 
insists  that  psychology  is  "a  purely  objective  experimental  branch 
of  natural  science.  Its  theoretical  goal  is  the  prediction  and  con- 
trol of  behavior.  Introspection  forms  no  essential  part  of  its 
methods,  nor  is  the  scientific  value  of  its  data  dependent  upon  the 
readiness  with  which  these  lend  themselves  to  introspection  in 
terms  of  consciousness."  7  The  behaviorist  can  write  a  psychology 
and  never  use  the  terms  "consciousness,  mental  state,  mind,  content, 
introspectively  verifiable  imagery  and  the  like."  8 

If  one  wishes  to  reduce  psychology  to  such  terms,  he  ought  "to 
go  the  whole  hog"  and  deny  the  existence  of  a  distinct  science  of 
psychology.  It  becomes  a  misleading  name  for  the  physiology  of 
the  nervous  and  muscular  systems  in  their  interrelations. 

The  one  differentiating  attribute  of  psychology  is  that  it  studies 
consciousness,  not  indeed  merely  "as  such,"  but  as  its  primary 
datum.  Certainly,  consciousness  behaves,  and  conscious  behavior 
is  a  specific  kind  of  behavior.  It  delays  reactions  to  stimuli  and 
effects  novel  junctions  between  the  sensorial  system  and  the  motor 
or  response  system  of  the  organism,  thus  creating  novel  types  of 
response. 

Psychology  must  have  constant  regard  to  the  motor  and  physi- 
cally and  socially  objective  correlations  of  consciousness.  It  must 
make  experimental  observations  upon  human  beings  and  animals. 
It  must  study  the  behavior  of  selves  in  society  and  solitude,  and  the 
social  objectifications  of  psychophysical  process  in  language,  social 
customs,  institutions  and  sociopsychical  currents.  But  all  these 
materials  and  methods,  to  yield  psychological  results,  must  be 
interpreted  in  terms  of  their  relations  to  consciousness  and  mind. 
Thus  it  would  not  be  misleading  to  define  psychology  as  the  science 
of  human  behavior,  provided  it  be  understood  that  distinctly 
human  behavior  is  the  conduct  of  selves  or  persons  capable  of 


335,  and  my  articles  "The  Study  of  Individuality,"  Philosophical  Review, 
Vol.  xi,  pp.  565-575,  and  "The  Psychological  Self  and  the  Actual  Personality" 
in  the  same  journal,  Vol.  xiv,  pp.  669-683. 

'John  B.  Watson,  Psychological  Review,  Vol.  xx,  1913,  pp.  158-177,  and 
Beliavior,  A  Textbook  of  Psychology.  For  a  good  brief  discussion  of  "self- 
psychology"  as  behavioristic  see  M.  W.  Calkins,  "The  Truly  Psychological 
Behaviorism,"  Psychological  Review,  Vol.  28,  1921,  pp.  1-18. 

8  Watson,  Psychological  Review,  Vol.  xx,    p.  166. 


296  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

rational  reflection,  selective  evaluation  of  interests  and  motives; 
and,  therefore,  of  conscious,  purposive  and  deliberately  chosen 
acts.  The  extreme  behaviorist  of  to-day  regards  the  self  as  being 
only  an  elaborate  piece  of  physicochemical  mechanism.  The  latter 
view  is  false  to  the  facts  of  human  nature.9 

There  is  abroad  to-day  a  theory  of  the  sciences  which  divides 
the  field  of  theoretical  knowledge  into  the  natural  sciences  and  the 
humanistic  or  social  sciences.  This  division  corresponds  very  well 
to  the  differences  in  materials  and  methods  in  the  study  of  physical 
nature  and  human  nature,  respectively.  But  if,  starting  from  this 
division,  the  claim  is  made  that  psychology  is  the  basic  social  or 
humanistic  science,  of  which  logic,  ethics,  aesthetics,  sociology,  his- 
tory and  the  science  of  religion  are  branches,  we  must  ask — what 
kind  of  psychology  ? 

If  psychology  be  defined  as  the  study  simply  of  neuro-muscular 
mechanisms,  certainly  it  cannot  furnish  an  adequate  groundwork 
for  logic  and  ethics;  for,  from  this  standpoint,  psychology  is  but 
a  branch  of  biology  and  biology  a  special  division  of  physics ;  thus 
the  so-called  humanistic  sciences  become  branches  of  physics.  But 
there  can  be  no  science  of  any  sort,  no  distinction  between  truth 
and  error,  unless  there  are  norms  or  rational  standards  of  judg- 
ment which  are  presupposed  and  used  in  all  systematic  inquiry. 
If  there  is  to  be  science,  the  logical  and  ethical  norms  which  the 
investigator  must  obey,  in  order  truly  to  know,  must  be  objectively 
valid ;  these  norms  are  objective  criteria  and  cannot  be  mere  occa- 
sional products  of  a  complex  of  mechanical  causes.  If  they  were 
but  this,  judgments  of  causal  connection  would  not  be  objectively 
true;  they  would  be  mere  events  on  the  same  level  as  all  sorts  of 
errors,  follies  or  crimes.  Even  if  psychology  be  defined  as  the 
analytical  and  causal  science  of  conscious  processes  it  presupposes 
the  same  norms.  In  order  that  truth  may  be  attained  by  man  he 
must  obey  rational  and  objective  criteria  of  thinking  and  conduct 
(thinking  is  a  species  of  conduct).  If  logic  and  ethics  are  purely 
descriptive  sciences  of  psychophysical  events,  then  there  are  no 
logical  and  ethical  standards.  For  the  psychologist  as  such  can 
know  nothing  of  true  and  false  unless  he  employs  the  logical 


"A  more  moderate  behaviorism  is  expounded,  in  H.  C.  Warren's  Human 
Psychology.  Woodworth's  Psychology  seems  to  me  to  include  what  is  of  last- 
ing value  in  the  behavioristic  standpoint. 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  PERSONALITY  297 

standards ;  just  as  he  can  know  nothing  of  good  and  bad  unless  he 
employs  the  ethical  standards.  Thus  to  make  psychology  the  sole 
basis  of  logic  and  ethics  is  to  destroy  the  logical  and  ethical  stand- 
ards and  to  involve  in  the  same  ruin  psychology  and  all  other 
sciences,  since  all  sciences  presuppose  that  there  are  objectively 
valid  norms  of  thinking.  Logic,  the  science  of  the  norms  and 
methods  of  correct  thinking,  is  the  scientia  scientiarum.  Ethical 
norms  are  presupposed  in  science  too,  since  there  is  an  ethics  of 
thought ;  it  is  the  duty  of  the  thinker  to  obey  the  norms  of  thought. 

Logical  and  ethical  judgments  are  judgments  of  value.  Such 
judgments  are  acts  of  reason,,  and  reason  functions  only  in  per- 
sons. These  judgments  claim  objective  validity;  and  this  claim, 
if  allowed,  will  involve  the  admission  that  the  rational  person,  in 
making  such  judgments,  is  an  organ  of  the  ultimate  meaning  of 
reality.  In  order  that  we  may  know  what  personality  is,  it  is 
necessary  above  all,  to  take  full  account  of  those  mental  acts  of  the 
self  which  are  embodied  or  expressed  in  its  logical,  ethical,  aesthetic 
and  religious  culture  systems.  In  science,  the  history  of  morality, 
the  arts,  and  religion,  we  find  the  best  clews  to  the  process  and  mean- 
ing of  personality.  As  creator  of  intrinsic  values  and  of  cultural 
systems  for  the  realization  of  these  values,  personality  reveals  a 
higher  level  of  reality  than  is  expressed  in  any  system  of  physical  or 
even  vital  forces.  Man's  cultural  and  spiritual  activity  is  just  as 
truly  an  offspring  of  the  cosmos  as  is  the  most  enormous  star ;  and 
it  is  much  more  significant. 

Considerations  of  the  above  sort  seem  to  be  at  the  root  of  the 
movement  against  "psychologism"  and  for  the  priority  of  logic,  in 
recent  German  philosophy,  in  which  Husserl,  Pfander,  Scheler, 
Stumpf  and  others  have  participated.  Th.  Lipps  and  O.  Kuelpe 
have  tried  to  combine  logic  and  psychology  by  giving  to  the  latter 
a  broader  and  more  philosophical  character  than  psychology  has 
lately  taken  in  America.  I  regret  the  present  drifting  apart  of 
psychological  theory  and  philosophy  as  harmful  to  both.  There  is, 
of  course,  a  multitude  of  experimental  problems  which  require 
division  of  labor;  but,  when  psychology  becomes  entirely  a 
trafficking  with  physiological  reactions  and  regards  the  higher  and 
more  complex  conscious  activities  of  man  as  not  a  legitimate  sub- 
ject of  systematic  inquiry  by  any  other  means  than  observations 
with  physiological  instruments  on  animal  and  human  bodies,  there 
is  all  the  more  need,  with  this  impoverishment  of  psychology,  that 


298  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

philosophers  should  cultivate  psychology  as  Wundt,  for  an  illus- 
trious example,  did  in  his  great  work  on  Folk  Psychology.10 

1  may  add  that  the  "Psychology  of  Act"  of  Brentano  and  his 
followers,  among  whom  would  be  numbered,  in  varying  measure, 
all  the  aforementioned  German  writers,  obviously  has  very  close 
affinities  with  the  American  and  English  "self-psychology.77 

Psychology  may  be  regarded  as  a  transitional  science,  one 
which  occupies  a  middle  ground  between  the  natural  and  the 
humanistic  or  cultural  sciences.  Its  roots  are  in  biology,  its 
branches  are  the  empirical  social  sciences,  such  as  the  psychology 
of  ethics  and  sociology ;  and  it  culminates  in  philosophy.  In  social 
psychology  and  in  the  comparative  psychology  of  the  history  of 
science,  morality,  art,  and  religion,  we  shall  find  important  data 
and  principles  for  a  philosophy  of  personality.  From  these  fields 
and  from  the  three  philosophical  culture  sciences  or  sciences  of 
intrinsic  values — namely,  ethics,  aesthetics,  and  the  philosophy  of 
religion — we  shall  draw  most  of  our  data,  since  we  are  concerned 
with  the  self,  not  so  much  in  the  sense  of  a  biological  organism  as, 
in  the  sense  of  a  reflective  thinker  and  agent  who  is  socialized, 
moralized,  and  rationalized  through  participation  in  the  social- 
historical  life  of  culture. 

In  short,  if  psychology  be  regarded  as  a  purely  natural  causal 
science,  which  is  concerned  only  with  the  analysis  and  description 
of  mental  elements  and  complexes  in  their  dependence  on  the 
nervous  system,  and  which  employs  only  the  mechanical  or  physical 
concepts  of  relation,  causation  and  function,  it  cannot  be  regarded 
as  the  chief,  much  less  the  sole,  basis  of  the  philosophical  sciences. 
If  psychology  be  regarded  as  primarily  the  systematic  study  of 
conscious  and  purposive  individuals,  it  is  the  chief  basis  of  philos- 
ophy and  the  humanistic  sciences.  It  is  the  latter  sort  of  psychol- 
ogy which  principally  interests  us  and  a  good  part  of  the  present 
volume  might  be  classified  as  a  psychology  of  conscious  indi- 
viduality. 


10 A  good  deal  of  valuable  work  has  been  done  in  America  in  "Social 
Psychology"  and  "Psychology  of  Religion." 


CHAPTER  XXIII 


THE  NATURE  OF  THE  SELF  1 


In  what  sense,  if  any,  can  we  say  that  the  empirical  individual 
or  personality  implies  a  unique  principle,  which  is  one  and  con- 
tinuous throughout  the  diversities  and  succession  of  the  indi- 
vidual's empirical  history?  This  is  the  vexatious  problem  of 
personal  identity.  It  is  the  most  central  and  weighty  of  all  meta- 
physical problems,  inasmuch  as  upon  its  solution,  however  tenta- 
tive, depends  one's  attitude  towards  all  metaphysical  and  axio- 
logical  questions — towards  the  problems  of  human  freedom,  of  the 
value  and  destiny  of  the  individual,  of  the  true  ends  and  values  of 
the  social  order  and  of  education  and  culture,  and  finally  of  the 
meaning  and  value  of  the  cosmical  order.  Hence  the  investigation 
of  the  problem  of  personal  identity  is  a  matter  of  the  utmost  prac- 
tical consequences.  For,  as  Bishop  Berkeley  said,  "Whatever  the 
world  thinks,  he  who  hath  not  much  meditated  upon  God,  the 
human  mind,  and  the  summum  honum,  may  possibly  make  a 
thriving  earthworm,  but  will  most  indubitably  make  a  sorry  patriot 
and  a  sorry  statesman."  To  which  I  add  that,  from  our  empirical 
standpoint,  meditation  upon  the  human  mind  is  the  prerequisite 
of  meditation  upon  God  and  the  summum  honum;  or,  if  you  prefer 
abstruse  language,  upon  true  values  and  their  cosmic  status. 

Moral  judgment  and  action,  the  administration  of  society  and 
all  education  proceed  upon  the  covert  assumption  that  the  normal 
individual  is  a  self-active  and  responsible  social  unit.  But  this 
assumption  is  challenged  by  biologists,  psychologists  and  sociolo- 
gists, as  well  as  by  many  philosophers,  on  the  ground  that  it  is  a 
naive  popular  misconception  which  is  dissipated  into  the  void  by 
the  analysis  of  human  personality.  The  latter  becomes,  under  the 
scientific  searchlight,  an  ever  shifting  mosaic  of  biological  impul- 

1  This  chapter  and  Chapter  28  are  expansions  of  an  article  ' '  The  Psy- 
chological Self  and  the  Actual  Personality,"  in  The  Philosophical  Beview, 
Vol.  xiv,  No.  6.     November  1905,  pp.  669-683. 

299 


300  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

sions  and  appetites,  of  neuromuscular  habit  automatisms  inter- 
mittently lighted  up  by  sporadic  flashes  of  sentience,  of  sensations, 
feelings  and  emotions,  and  of  images  and  ideas,  which  are  all  by- 
products of  nerve  processes  and  are  illusorily  believed  to  be  efficient 
factors  in  the  life  of  the  self.  From  this  standpoint  personality  is 
the  changing  and  passive  product  of  the  interaction  between  the 
physical  organism  and  its  environment.  I  have  already  argued  at 
sufficient  length  against  the  reduction  of  the  mind  to  a  physical 
organism  or  machine.  It  now  remains  to  inquire  what  grounds 
there  are  for  the  belief  in  a  mental  or  spiritual  principle  of  personal 
identity. 

The  belief  in  question  is  challenged  chiefly  on  two  kinds  of 
grounds:  (1)  a  rigorous  inspection  of  the  facts  of  consciousness 
does  not  bring  to  light  any  datum  corresponding  to  the  so-called 
mental  self;  (2)  the  many  facts  of  both  normal  and  abnormal 
character  support  the  view  that  the  conscious  life  of  the  self  con- 
sists of  mere  bubbles  and  surface  currents  which  are  produced  by 
physiological  processes  in  the  subterranean  depths  of  the  uncon- 
scious. In  the  present  and  following  chapters  I  shall  examine  in 
order  the  above  two  types  of  consideration. 

The  naturalistic  rejecter  of  the  self  argues  as  follows: 
Psychological  analysis  shows  the  conscious  self  to  be  complex  and 
ever  changing.  The  analyst  never  succeeds  in  tracking  that  mys- 
terious entity,  the  self-identical  self,  to  its  lair.  It  forever  escapes 
him,  and  he  is  therefore  ever  disposed  to  regard  it  as  nonexistent. 
What  he  finds  in  consciousness  is  an  ever  changing  variety  of 
mental  elements  living  in  changing  relations.  The  mental  ele- 
ments may  be  reduced  to  two  fundamental  types — sensations  or 
sensa  (Hume's  "Sense  Impressions")  which  are  the  raw  materials 
of  knowledge;  and  feeling  impulses  or  affections,  which  are  the 
raw  materials  of  emotions,  sentiments  and  acts  of  will.  Each 
element  has  its  own  unique  quality;  and  the  elements  vary  in 
intensity  or  degree  and  in  duration.  Sensations  vary  in  clearness 
and  distinctness ;  affections  vary  in  degrees  of  pleasantness  and 
unpleasantness.  In  the  actual  mental  life  the  sensory  elements  of 
consciousness  are  fused  together  to  form  percepts,  and,  by  retention 
and  reproduction,  images.  From  percepts  and  images  arise,  by 
repeated  association  and  fusion,  the  vaguer  and  more  generic 
images  called  general  ideas  or  concepts.  The  affective  mental 
elements  are  fused  together  into  more  complicated  and  abstract 


THE  NATURE  OF  THE  SELF  301 

forms,  thus  giving  rise  to  emotional  disposition  or  sentiments  from 
which  arise  volitions.  In  the  actual  mental  life,  of  course,  the 
sensational  and  affective  elements  are  interwoven  at  every  stage 
in  their  development ;  they  are  distinguishable  but  not  separable 
aspects  of  the  organism's  awareness. 

The  feeling  of  selfhood  is  a  fusion  of  internal  sensations  from 
the  vital  organs — chiefly  from  the  visceral,  thoracic  and  cephalic 
organs — sensations  of  respiration,  pulse  beat,  massive  sensations  in 
the  stomach,  strain  of  the  eye  muscles  and  other  head  muscles ;  all 
accompanied  by  feelings  of  pleasantness  and  unpleasantness. 
William  James  put  the  matter  neatly  when  he  said,  "The  'I  think' 
which  Kant  said  must  be  able  to  accompany  all  my  objects  is  the 
'I  breathe'  which  actually  does  accompany  them.  .  .  .  Breath, 
which  was  ever  the  original  of  'spirit,'  breath  moving  outward  be- 
tween the  glottis  and  the  nostrils,  is,  I  am  persuaded,  the  essence 
out  of  which  philosophers  have  constructed  the  entity  known  to 
them  as  consciousness."  2  But  James  assumes  philosophers  able  to 
construct  entities.  To  take  such  observations  as  abolishing  the 
validity  in  the  belief  in  a  self  one  ought  to  explain  how  the  breath 
comes  to  say  "I  breathe,"  and  thus  to  construct  a  theory  of  itself. 
For  the  breath  suddenly  to  catch  its  breath  and  say  Bespiro  ergo 
sum,  if  there  is  really  no  thinking  self,  is  no  whit  less  mysterious 
than  for  a  philosopher  to  say,  Cogito  ergo  sum.  In  fact  it  is  the 
same  proposition — in  other  words  breath  or  blood  or  visceral 
pressure  or  head  strain  suddenly  turning  from  a  physicochemical 
process  into  a  philosopher  is  a  stupendous  miracle.  Verily, 
psychologists  are  facile  at  cheating  themselves  and  the  public  with 
words. 

In  a  similar  fashion  deliberate  volition  is  resolved  into  a 
blindly  determined  complex  or  fusion  of  elemental  instincts,  emo- 
tions and  desires,  with  percepts  and  images  arising  in  the  same 
fashion.  The  process  of  willing,  even  in  the  case  of  prolonged 
deliberation  and  so-called  rational  choice,  is  resolved  into  a  com- 
plex feeling  of  instability  or  uneasiness  due  to  the  conflict  of  the 
emotional  dispositions.  When  this  conflict  issues  finally  in  the 
decision,  "I  will  do  this  because  it  is  my  duty,"  this  conscious 
decision  is  but  the  illusory  by-product  of  the  final  stage  of  the 
emotional  conflict.     It  is  not  explained  why  an  emotional  complex 

3  William  James '  Essays  in  Radical  Empiricism,  p.  37. 


302  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

should  thus  give  rise  miraculously  to  the  conscious  illusion  "I 

will." 

The  rejection  of  the  self,  because  of  failure  to  find  it  in  an 
introspective  analysis  of  consciousness,  has  never  been  more  clearly 
or  forcibly  put  than  by  Hume.  "I  desire  those  philosophers  who 
pretend  that  we  have  an  idea  of  the  substance  of  our  minds  to 
point  out  the  impression  that  produces  it,  and  tell  distinctly  after 
what  manner  that  impression  operates,  and  from  what  object  it 
is  derived."  3  "There  are  some  philosophers  who  imagine  we  are 
at  every  moment  intimately  conscious  of  what  we  call  our  self: 
that  we  feel  its  existence,  and  its  continuance  in  existence:  and 
are  certain,  beyond  the  evidence  of  a  demonstration,  both  of  its 
perfect  identity  and  simplicity.  For  my  part,  when  I  enter  most 
intimately  into  what  I  call  myself,  I  always  stumble  on  some  par- 
ticular perception  or  other,  of  heat  or  cold,  light  or  shade,  love  or 
hatred,  pain  or  pleasure.  I  never  catch  myself  at  any  time  with- 
out a  perception  and  can  never  observe  anything  but  the  percep- 
tion. But,  setting  aside  some  metaphysicians  of  this  kind,  I  may 
venture  to  affirm  of  the  rest  of  mankind  that  they  are  nothing  but 
a  bundle  or  collection  of  different  perceptions,  which  succeed  each 
other  with  an  inconceivable  rapidity,  and  are  in  a  perpetual  flux 
and  movement." 4  Psychology  has  made  much  progress  since 
Hume's  day:  nevertheless  the  above  passages  state  clearly  what 
must,  by  the  nature  of  the  case,  be  the  result  of  the  attempt  to 
reduce  the  "passing  moment"  in  the  living  process  of  consciousness 
to  particular  elements  and  their  connections.  Mental  life  is, 
when  regarded  as  the  empirical  continuum  of  selfhood,  indeed  in 
"perpetual  flux  and  movement";  and  the  attempt  to  analyze  a 
cross-section  of  it  is  rendered  successful  chiefly  through  the  power 
of  retrospection  or  memory.  We  cannot  be  a  certain  phase  of 
conscious  process  and  pulverize  it  at  the  same  instant.  When  we 
introspectively  examine  and  analyze  mental  processes  we  are  not 
catching  the  self  in  the  full  tide  of  its  life.  Atomistic  analysis  of 
the  structure  of  consciousness  necessarily  involves  neglect  of  the 
immediately  experienced  and  fluid  continuity  of  consciousness. 
For  this  analysis  transforms  the  actual  unity  into  artificial  and 
inert  elements.     This  type  of  psychological  analysis  does  not  find 


*  Hume,  Treatise  of  Human  Nature,  Book  i,  Part  iv,  Section  5. 

*  Ibid.  Book  i,  Part  iv,  Section  6. 


THE  NATURE  OF  THE  SELF  303 

the  self,  since  it  so  completely  transforms  the  actual  movement  of 
consciousness  that  there  is  no  place  for  a  self  in  its  artificial 
mosaic  of  elements.  The  real  self  cannot  be  one  particular  element 
among  the  other  elements.  It  cannot  be  a  mere  constituent  of 
itself.  The  whole  cannot  be  a  part  of  itself.  Every  attempt  to 
objectify  it  in  this  fashion  must  fail.  One  can  thus  obtain,  at 
best,  only  a  dead  remnant  of  the  self,  an  object-me  never  the 
subject  I.  Every  step  in  the  analysis  of  consciousness  into  a  com- 
plex of  elements  presupposes,  however,  the  self  to  which  the  ele- 
ments belong  and  which  performs  the  analysis ;  but  which  itself 
eludes  envisagement  as  a  particular  psychical  element.  The  self 
is  the  seer  which,  unseen,  sees.  Psychological  analysis  is  a  post- 
mortem affair,  but  the  self  is  always  present  at  the  inquest.  It  is 
at  once  corpse,  coroner  and  jury.  Naturally,  then,  the  self  is  not 
found  in  this  way.  What  are  found  are  fragments  of  the  actual 
ego,  torn  from  their  dynamic  context  in  the  process  of  living 
experience ;  phases  or  moments  in  the  life  of  the  real  ego  precipi- 
tated from  the  living  pulse  of  consciousness. 

When  I  become  self-conscious,  for  example,  at  the  present 
moment  and  analyze  this  pulse  of  consciousness,  after  the  manner 
of  atomistic  psychology,  I  find  a  vague  mass  of  organic  sensations 
and  sensations  from  my  clothes  as  the  general  background,  a  visual 
perception  of  part  of  my  body  filled  out  by  an  image  of  parts  of 
my  body  which  I  do  not  see,  the  kinesthetic  sensations  involved  in 
writing,  a  feeling  of  tension  in  my  forehead,  and  the  idea  of  the 
personal  pronoun  "I."  What  is  left  out  in  this  analysis  is  the 
immediate  feeling  of  selfhood,  without  which  I  could  not  recognize 
any  of  these  elements  as  belonging  to  me.  The  organic  sensations 
are  not  conscious  of  themselves  as  being  the  self.  Not  even  the 
strain  sensations  in  the  head  or  the  idea  of  the  personal  pronoun 
"I"  can  be  said  to  be  the  self  which  recognizes  these  elements  as 
constituents  of  its  momentary  complex  process.  This  is  the  very 
principle  which  sustains,  directs,  and  renders  intelligible  all 
analysis  of  conscious  processes.  It  is  the  immediate  feeling  of 
selfhood. 

It  has  been  asserted  that  it  is  a  paradoxical  and  contradictory 
assumption  to  say  that  a  subject  can  be  its  own  object,  a  self  its 
own  not-self.  The  self,  in  so-called  introspection,  must  split  up 
into  two  distinct  things,  the  self  observing  and  the  self  observed. 
But  the  observed  self  is  no  longer  self,  and  thus  there  is  found  in 


304  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

experience  no  self  at  all,  but  only  a  series  of  feelings.  If  one 
admit  the  force  of  this  objection,  then  so-called  introspection  can 
consist  only  in  one  conscious  element  knowing  another  conscious 
element.  Consciousness  is  thus  resolved  into  a  series  of  elements, 
any  one  of  which  may  know  any  other.  An  element  of  consciousness 
A  may  know  another  element  B,  and  in  turn  be  known  as  know- 
ing B  by  a  third  element  C,  and  so  forth.  The  only  unity  is  what 
William  James  has  called  the  "unity  of  the  passing  thought."  He 
says  that  we  need  no  other  knower  than  this.5  But  to  say  that 
any  element  in  a  series  knows  another  element  in  that  series  is  td 
attribute  to  the  element  which  knows  the  other  element  precisely 
the  unity  of  consciousness  which  is  meant  by  a  psychical  self. 
The  unity  of  the  passing  thought  carries  in  itself  the  very  unity  of 
the  subject,  which  it  is  supposed  empirically  to  supplant.  A 
series  of  feelings  which  is  aware  of  itself  as  a  series  is  just  what 
I  mean  by  a  self. 

It  is  no  doubt  difficult  to  observe  introspectively  one's  own 
state  of  mind,  when  one  is  engrossed  in  an  object  or  overmastered 
by  a  strong  emotion.  Nevertheless  one  is  able  to  recognize  at  least 
that  these  experiences  are  one's  own,  and,  to  this  extent,  be  con- 
scious of  being  conscious.  Immediately  one  feels  one's  experiences 
as  one's  own,  immediately  one  becomes  aware  of  the  primal  fact 
of  self-feeling,  one  becomes  self-conscious. 

I  have  said  that  introspection  is  almost  entirely  retrospection. 
But,  then,  retrospection  is  introspection;  the  memory-content  is 
one's  own.  To  catch  the  fleeing  moment  on  the  wing  is  to  arrest 
its  flight ;  but  one  recognizes  the  arrested  moment  as  one's  own 
and  can  describe  it  as  such.  There  are  great  differences  of  indi- 
vidual capacity  for  self-observation.  The  average  man  is  not 
usually  introspective,  and  many  psychologists  are  not  in  this 
respect  gifted  above  the  average.  The  power  of  introspection, 
however,  can  be  cultivated.  The  ability  to  describe  their  own 
mental  processes  seems  to  belong  peculiarly  to  mystics  and 
ecstatics,  who  have  given  us  very  vivid  descriptions  of  their  own 


•James,  Principles  of  Psychology,  Vol.  I,  pp.  338  ff.  No  student  should 
fail  to  study  closely  this,  the  greatest  work  of  descriptive  psychology  in  the 
English  language;  especially  Chapter  9,  "The  Stream  of  Thought,"  and 
Chapter  10,  "The  Consciousness  of  Self."  Since  I  shall  frequently  criticize 
James  I  wish  to  say  now  that  I  owe  as  much  to  him  as  to  any  other  modern 
writer. 


THE  NATURE  OF  THE  SELF  305 

exalted  conditions.6  Such  are  also  psychasthenics  like  Maine  de 
Biran  and  Amiel.  There  are  many  degrees  of  self-observation. 
In  general,  self-observation  is  clearest  when  it  is  involuntary.  The 
deliberate  effort  to  observe  one's  own  state  of  consciousness  usually 
results  in  partial  failure.  And  of  course  accuracy  in  the  descrip- 
tion thereof  depends  on  accuracy  of  memory  for  subjective  con- 
ditions.   Here  too,  there  are  striking  individual  differences. 

One  may  call  it  a  paradox,  and  doubtless  it  is  one  of  the  irre- 
ducible paradoxes  of  experience,  that  one  can  in  the  same  instant 
and  in  the  same  psychical  complex  be  subject  and  object,  /  and 
me.  It  is  none  the  less  a  fact.  Instead  of  allowing  misconceptions 
of  the  self  drawn  from  physical  metaphors  to  blind  one  to  the  fact, 
one  who  wishes  to  do  justice  to  the  uniqueness  of  selves  in  the 
system  of  experience  will  begin  with  this  fact.  Consciousness  is 
much  more  complex,  variable,  and  elusive  in  its  contents  and 
movements  than  any  kind  of  physical  object.  Consequently,  self- 
observation  is  more  difficult  than  observation  of  physical  things. 
This  is  not  a  sufficient  reason  for  ignoring  or  denying  the  fact  that 
a  self  can  know  itself  immediately,  or  for  asserting  that  the  self 
which  knows  is  in  no  degree  identical  with  the  self  which  is  known. 
They  are  distinct  but  not  separate. 

While  the  self  has  immediate  self-knowledge  in  feeling  it  is 
true  that  the  self  that  is  known  cannot  be  the  whole  self  to  which 
belong  the  feelings,  thoughts  and  will  attributes.  The  self  as 
known  is  distinct  from  the  self  as  knower  and  is  but  a  fragmentary 
expression  of  the  whole  self.  The  self  knows  directly  but  a  passing 
phase  of  itself.  On  the  basis  of  introspection  alone  one  would 
not  be  justified  in  asserting  that  all  processes  of  conscious  life 
must  belong  to  one  unitary  self  or  person  which  is  their  bearer  or 
substrate.  Not  only  do  sensationalistic  "impressionists,"  such 
as  Hume,  Mach  and  a  crowd  of  others,  deny  the  need  of  assuming 
a  real  ego;  but  even  Wundt  and  many  other  psychologists  reject 
the  notion  of  a  soul-substance  or  substrate  of  conscious  life  in  favor 
of  the  actuality  theory.  According  to  the  latter,  the  self  is  simply 
the  actuality  of  conscious  process.    But  does  not  this  view  logically 

*Cf.  the  Confessions  of  St.  Augustine,  Kousseau's  Autobiography, 
Goethe's  Wahrheit  und  Dichtung,  and  the  quotations  from  the  writings  of 
religious  mystics  and  ecstatics  in  James'  The  Varieties  of  Religious  Experi- 
ence and  in  Evelyn  Underhill  's  Mysticism.  See  also  K.  Oesterreieh,  Die 
Phdnomenologie  des  Ich  in  ihren  Grundproblemen,  Band  I,  Leipzig,  1910,  es- 
pecially Chap.  9,  "Das  Problem  der  SelbstwahrneMimung." 


306  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

reduce  the  unity  of  the  self  to  the  passing  moment  ?  What  becomes 
of  all  the  psychical  capacities  that  are  not  functioning  in  the  pres- 
ent passing  moment  of  the  individual's  consciousness  ?  Do  these 
capacities  persist  simply  as  the  modifications  of  nerve  structures  ? 
I  shall  discuss  the  latter  question  more  fully  in  connection  with 
the  mind-body  problem.  Here  I  am  concerned  with  the  more 
general  question — have  we  good  grounds  for  inferring,  from  the 
facts  of  individual  experience,  that  there  may  be  a  continuing 
psychical  or  psychophysical  entity — not  a  passive,  blocklike  sub- 
stance (the  travesty  of  the  "soul"  or  "self"  doctrine  set  up  by  its 
critics)  but  the  enduring  active  principle  or  living  substrate  of  the 
passing  moments  of  feelings,  thoughts,  choices,  volitions  ?  I  think 
we  have  a  good  right  to  do  so.  I  am  so  old-fashioned  that  I  believe 
in  the  soul  and  am  not  frightened  by  the  word  "substrate."  My 
reasons  for  the  belief  are  as  follows:  (1)  The  indubitable  facts  of 
the  consciousness  of  continuing  identity,  of  the  unity  and  con- 
tinuity of  the  individual's  experience.  (2)  The  sense  of  initiative 
and  responsibility.  (3)  The  results  of  the  activities  of  persons  in 
building  up,  altering  and  rebuilding  the  structures  of  human 
civilization — material,  social,  scientific. 

1.  (a)  The  experiential  unity  of  conscious  life  at  every 
moment  is  a  fact,  though  one's  attention  may  not  be  directed  to 
it;  but,  just  as  now  I  am  not  attending  to  some  constituents  of 
my  present  experience  which  are  yet  recognized  to  be  parts  of  it 
as  soon  as  I  attend  to  them,  so  I  cannot  escape  the  recognition 
that  all  that  I  experience  now  constitutes  one  pulse  of  my  experi- 
ence. So  far  from  the  complexity,  or  even  the  distracteclness,  of 
my  present  pulse  being  evidence  against  this  unity,  they  are  evi- 
dences for  it.  I  may  say  that  I  cannot  completely  harmonize  my 
present  conflicting  attitudes  of  mind  but,  in  so  doing,  I  recognize 
that  they  are  all  mine.  I  may  say  that  I  am  distracted  by  the 
complexity  and  incompatibilities  of  my  present  ideas  and  infer- 
ences but,  in  so  doing,  I  imply  that  I  own  them  all.  Even  an 
extremely  disordered  self,  a  divided  self,  a  so-called  multiple  or 
alternating  "personality,"  implies  the  unity  of  the  self  amidst  all 
its  aberrations. 

(b)  The  continuity  of  the  self,  the  sense  of  continuous  self- 
identity,  involves  the  persistence  of  something  that  is  continuously 
one  through  change.  I  remember  that  I  was  present  last  night  at 
a  reception  and  that  I  said  and  heard  such  and  such  things.     I 


THE  NATURE  OF  THE  SELF  307 

can  compare  the  differences  between  my  attitudes  then  and  now. 
I  can  discuss  with  my  friend  what  was  said  and  done.  The  events 
of  last  night  are  past.  They  do  not  exist  in  the  present,  but  they 
are  psychically  real  in  the  sense  that  they  did  exist  and  that  they 
are  remembered.  Memory  is  a  reality,  and  it  does  not  consist  in 
the  complete  re-creation  of  what  then  happened.  This  cannot  be, 
for  my  present  is  not  and  cannot  be  the  same  as  my  past  state.  My 
ability  to  recall,  identify  and  date,  what  then  happened,  implies 
recognition  of  similarity-in-difference.  How  could  I  remember 
what  has  ceased  to  be  as  an  actual  experience,  how  could  I  ever 
reproduce  in  a  different  temporal-spatial  setting  what  I  experi- 
enced then,  unless  I  were  in  some  manner  the  same  self?  If  I 
were  nothing  but  the  passing  moment  how  could  I  compare  the 
past  and  the  future  with  the  present  passing  moment  ?  For 
expectation,  no  less  than  memory,  involves  the  actual  continuity  of 
the  self.  If  I  were  nothing  but  a  passing  thought  I  could  never 
recognize  the  passage  of  moments  nor  find  any  meaning  in  saying 
that  I  am  only  a  passing  thought. 

Mere  association  of  ideas  will  not  account  for  memory.  My 
present  ideas  of  last  night's  events  are  new  events.  They  are  not 
contiguous  with  the  latter  in  space  and  time.  My  recollections 
of  last  night  are  as  much  new  events  in  my  mental  history  as  are 
my  perceptual  recognitions  of  old  family  scenes  into  which  I 
enter  anew  when  I  return  to  my  boyhood  home.  There  can  be  no 
memory  which  is  not  based  on  the  recognition  of  similarity. 
There  can  be  no  recognition  of  similarity  without  recognition  of 
difference  in  experiences.  For  similarity  is  not  partial  identity 
of  existence.  Recognition  of  similarity  presupposes  recognition 
of  difference  or  diversity.  In  turn,  in  order  to  recognize  diversity 
of  existence,  I  must  have  lived  through  these  diversities  and  have 
noted  their  similarities  through  their  differences,  or  vice  versa. 
To  attempt  to  explain  memory  by  the  passive  association  of  ideas 
is  to  presuppose,  in  these  associations,  precisely  what  is  to  be 
explained  by  them.  It  is  to  beg  the  whole  question  of  personal 
identity. 

What  I  have  said  in  regard  to  a  simple  case  of  memory  applies, 
with  even  more  force,  to  the  persistence  and  activation  of  powers 
or  capacities  developed  in  the  past  but  not  active  now.  Expectant 
and  purposive  attitudes  are  grounded  on  memory  and  habit,  inter- 
woven with  native  and  modified  desire  and  interest.    These  factors, 


308  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

in  turn,  imply  the  continuity  of  'psychophysical  dispositions.  The 
actual  self  is  a  more  or  less  organized  complex  of  psychophysical 
dispositions.  My  ego  includes  now  a  considerable  number  of  atti- 
tudes or  incipient  acts  that  are  the  results  of  native  dispositions 
modified  by  the  interaction  of  my  original  capacities  with  environ- 
mental conditions.  My  ego  is  the  living  record  of  my  history 
since  conception.  Many  of  these  dispositions  are  not  present  in 
my  clear  consciousness ;  but  they  are  not  inert  or  inactive.  They 
are  subconscious  factors  which  may  come  into  the  field  of  clear 
consciousness  at  any  moment.  The  ego  is  a  complex  unity  which 
involves  many  subconscious  factors.7  If  we  take  the  word  "thinks" 
in  a  sufficiently  broad  sense  to  include  all  activities  of  a  mind,  a 
self,  then  Descartes  was  right  in  saying  "The  soul  always  thinks." 
A  lifelong  study  of  dream  life  has  convinced  me  that  the  activity 
of  the  mind  never  ceases,  even  in  the  deepest  sleep.  Subconscious- 
ness, in  natural  or  artificial  sleep,  is  sub-attentive  consciousness. 

Thus  far,  I  have  argued  for  the  self  as  the  unitary  and  contin- 
uous ground,  or  owner,  which  is  identical  with  the  continuous 
complex  and  varying  attitudes  of  the  mind,  when  these  are  taken 
as  a  whole.  I  do  not  mean  that  the  real  self  is  something  which 
lies  behind  or  underneath  the  actual  processes  of  conscious  life,  like 
the  machine  which  projects  the  moving  picture,  or  like  a  room 
which  contains  a  variety  of  articles.  I  do  mean  that  the  process 
factors  of  selfhood  have  no  reality  apart  from  the  whole  and  con- 
tinuing ego,  and,  equally,  that  the  ego  has  no  reality  apart  from 
the  continuously  and  varyingly  active  factors  which  are  the  ego  in 
its  concreteness.  The  actuality  theory  of  the  ego  is  the  true  theory, 
if  it  be  admitted  that  its  actuality  includes  many  persistent  factors 
that  may  be  at  any  moment  only  virtually  conscious.  The  ego  is 
the  living  and  pulsating  unity,  not  the  mechanical  sum,  of  its 
dynamic  elements. 

2.  The  hypothesis  that  the  self  or  ego  is  a  real  cause  is  the 
most  natural  explanation  of  the  sense  of  initiative  and  responsi- 
bility, the  feeling  of  self-determination,  and  of  the  whole  life 
of  seeking,  of  choice  and  purposiveness ;  which  characterize  the 
normal  individual.  It  is  sheer  dogmatism,  not  openminded  em- 
piricism, to  say  either  that  the  only  efficient  factors  in  our  world 
are  purely  mechanical  and  physical ;  or  that,  since  all  change  must 


'For  further  discussion  Cf.  Chaps.  25,  26  and  27. 


THE  NATURE  OF  THE  SELF  309 

be  the  effect  solely  of  the  rearrangement  of  spatial  elements,  there- 
fore the  ego  cannot  he  a  canse.  The  kind  of  change  which  occurs 
when  a  human  self  makes  a  critical  choice  differs  fundamentally 
from  the  kind  of  change  which  occurs  when  the  breeze  scatters  a 
pile  of  ashes.  To  say  that  a  self  is  a  cause  is  not  to  imply  that  it 
acts  capriciously,  but  only  that  the  self  is  an  original  or  unique 
determining  factor  in  a  process  that  is,  therefore,  unique  in  kind. 

3.  That  selves  are  unitary  and  continuous  realities  and  are 
unique  causal  factors  is  the  most  reasonable  explanation  of  the 
whole  work  of  human  civilization.  If  we  consider  the  develop- 
ment and  the  mutations  of  cultures,  the  beginnings,  growth  and 
transformation  of  cultures,  of  social  and  political  systems,  of  lan- 
guages, literatures  and  arts,  of  morals  and  religion  and  of  science 
and  philosophy,  we  cannot  really  account  for  these  novel  and  vigor- 
ous eruptions  in  the  order  of  physical  nature  except  as  effects  of 
the  striving  of  real  selves  for  self-maintenance,  self-expression, 
self-development. 

The  self,  treated  as  an  object  given  for  inspection,  appears  to 
take  on  a  spatial  and  bodily  character,  and  the  easiest  way  to 
explain  its  contents  is  in  terms  of  bodily  sensations  and  affections 
with  their  conditioning  nerve-processes.  In  this  respect  analytical 
psychology  carries  forward,  in  a  more  rigorous  fashion,  a  pro- 
cedure which  begins  in  common-sense  thinking.  The  consideration 
of  the  contents  of  past  experience  by  one  innocent  of  psychological 
training  involves  the  quasi-materialization  of  the  self.  For  the 
item  of  past  experience  is  looked  upon  as  a  fixed  and  persistently 
existing  fact.  Past  ideas  are  regarded  as  packed  away  somehow 
in  the  storeroom  of  the  mind.  This  assumption  that  ideas  are  like 
physical  things  or  elements  is  the  fundamental  error  of  associa- 
tionist  psychology.  Now,  in  so  far  as  the  self  is  identified  with  a 
collection  of  past  and  present  sensations,  affections  and  images,  or 
"ideas"  it  is  regarded  as  a  quasi-material  thing,  a  "bundle  of 
impressions."  The  atomistic  psychology  of  to-day  does  not  regard 
the  contents  of  conscious  as  static  entities.  It  does,  how- 
ever, regard  them  as  dependent  elements,  whose  permanent  sub- 
structures or  bases  are  nerve-paths.  Its  position  in  regard  to  the 
self  is  a  translation  of  Hume's  psychological  atomism  into  terms 
of  neural  structure  and  activity.  Hume's  conclusion  in  regard 
to  the  nonexistence  of  the  self  was  a  logical  deduction  from  his 
starting  point.    But  he  looked  for  the  self  in  the  wrong  place  and 


310  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

in  the  wrong  way.  Contemporary  psychologists  who,  not  finding 
the  self  as  a  permanent  core  or  center  of  sensations  and  images, 
assert  that  it  does  not  exist,  except  as  a  system  of  association  paths 
among  the  cortical  neurones,  are,  like  Hume,  looking  for  the  self 
in  the  wrong  way  and  consequently  do  not  find  it  in  the  right  place. 
The  actual  self  lives  in  attitudes,  or  active  and  appreciative 
relations  to  objects.  It  is  an  active  principle  that  thinks  and  thus 
affirms  or  denies  in  logical  judgment ;  that  chooses  and  thus  selects 
and  avoids  in  willing;  that  feels  and  thus  loves  and  hates,  joys 
and  sorrows.  Alike  in  judging,  in  doing,  and  in  feeling,  the  self 
functions  as  a  dynamic  center,  an  active  source  of  judgment,  valua- 
tion and  purpose.  It  is  not  a  changeless  substance  which  under- 
lies the  concrete  and  changing  contents  of  the  empirical  life,  but 
a  living  active  unity  which  has  and  knows  these  contents  as  its 
own.  "States  of  consciousness,"  so-called,  are  not  directly  known 
as  contents  isolated  from  the  relation  of  the  self  to  its  world,  and 
they  do  not  exist  as  such.  Sensations,  percepts,  images,  concepts, 
interposed  by  the  philosopher  or  psychologist  between  the  self  and 
its  world  of  objects,  are  artificial  products,  results  of  retrospective 
analysis  obtained  by  abstraction  from  the  actual  relations  between 
the  self  and  its  world.  What  is  directly  known  is  a  psychophysical 
individual,  in  active  and  passive  relations  with  a  world  of  objects; 
in  other  words  the  self  as  knower  perceiving  concrete  things,  think- 
ing concrete  objects  and  their  relations;  the  self  as  doer  and 
sufferer,  feeling,  valuing,  and  striving  to  alter  objects  or  its  own 
relations  to  them.  Of  course,  I  include  under  "objects"  here  the 
field  of  other  selves. 

In  the  actual  movement  of  life  the  self  is  as  immediate  and 
real  as  the  objects  of  its  judgment,  valuation  and  action.  I  have 
maintained  that  the  immediate  feeling  of  selfhood  is  involved  in 
all  analysis  of  consciousness,  since  consciousness  is  always  indi- 
viduated. The  "concept"  of  the  self,  in  distinction  from  the  imme- 
diate feeling  thereof,  must  be  framed  in  the  light  of  all  the  aspects 
and  relationships  of  the  individual.  I  wish,  in  conclusion,  to 
insist  that  the  concept  of  the  self  is  at  least  as  necessary  a  factor 
in  thinking  out  the  meaning  of  experience  in  its  totality  as  is  the 
concept  of  the  world  regarded  as  the  totality  of  all  physical 
processes  and  their  relations. 

The  fact  that  the  self  is  a  complex  does  not  invalidate  either 
its  unity  or  its  reality.     If  it  is  a  specific  kind  of  complex,  a  com- 


THE  NATURE  OF  THE  SELF  311 

plex  which  functions  as  a  whole  in  knowing  and  willing,  in  organ- 
izing its  experiences  and  realizing  values,  it  is  a  unique  kind  of 
reality.  Any  datum  which  shows,  upon  the  closest  inspection, 
specificity  of  function  must  be  admitted  to  be  an  elemental  con- 
stituent of  reality.     Such  data  are  minds. 

Again,  the  fact  that  a  self  or  mind  appears  and  operates  only 
in  association  with  a  certain  physicochemical  complex,  which  is 
therefore  the  condition  of  its  functioning,  in  no  way  destroys  its 
unique  reality.  Let  us  admit  that  a  specific  chemical  combination 
of  physical  elements  is  one  indispensable  condition  (a  scientific 
cause)  of  the  self's  functioning.  Then  the  whole  psychophysical 
self  is  in  part  the  result  of  mechanical  processes,  but  it  is  not 
merely  mechanical;  and  a  world  in  which  selves  appear  and 
operate  is  not  a  purely  mechanical  world.  For  it  is  an  elemental 
fact  that  the  specific  mentality  of  the  self  is  correlated  with  a 
correspondingly  specific  physicochemical  complex.  Selves  in  their 
wholeness  are  irreducible  factors  in  a  process  which  is  not  at  all 
the  same  kind  of  process  that  would  have  occurred  had  there  been 
no  selves. 

Any  attempt  to  formulate  the  nature  and  meaning  of  the  world 
process  which  leaves  the  unique  mentality  of  selfhood  out  of  ac- 
count omits  the  most  significant  Saturn  of  experience.  To  say  that 
selves  have  originated  as  a  result  merely  of  certain  very  complex 
physical  processes  is  to  beg  the  question.  The  "real"  world  process 
is  one  which  has  taken  the  direction  of  personalization,  which  has 
resulted  in  beings  that  are  prima  facie  agents  in  the  further  modi- 
fication of  the  process  itself.  Therefore,  the  world  process  is 
inexpugnably  qualified  by,  and  must  be  read  in  the  light  of,  the 
emergence  and  energizing  in  it  of  intelligent  value-creating  agents. 

Summing  up  this  discussion,  a  self  is  an  organized  complex 
of  physiological  energies  operating  through  a  determinate  mechan- 
ism and  illuminated  by  a  sentient  consciousness  which  rises, 
through  its  functions  of  recognitive  and  selective  memory,  selective 
analysis  and  synthesis  of  elements  of  its  experience,  to  the  point  of 
exercising  a  considerable  measure  of  control  in  the  valuation,  direc- 
tion, and  organization  of  its  own  native  tendencies  as  well  as  of  its 
environment.  The  physiological  energies  and  the  sensory-impul- 
sive materials  of  valuation  and  choice  are  the  complex  resultants 
of  heredity  and  variation  in  the  organism.  Biologically,  the  self 
is  a  center  of  individuation  for  congenital  tendencies  or  disposi- 


312  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

tions  which  run  back  into  the  remote  and  undeciphered  past  of 
the  race,  a  meeting  point  wherein  these  converging  tendencies  give 
rise  to  fresh  variations.8  But,  without  the  selective  analytic  and 
synthetic  principle  revealed  in  conscious  activity,  the  biological 
individual  would  not  be  a  true  self. 

Culturally,  the  self  is  the  product  of  the  reaction  of  the  con- 
scious organism  above  described  to  the  environmental  factors  of 
civilization — to  language,  social  and  political  systems,  manners,  arts 
and  sciences,  and  religions.  The  ordinary  individual  is  for  the  most 
part  passive  in  his  reactions.  He  modifies  inherited  culture  systems 
only  in  slight  degree.  The  superordinary  individual,  the  leader, 
the  thinker,  the  genius,  recreates  these  social  culture  systems. 
The  self  is  thus,  for  the  most  part,  the  product  of  his  somatic  and 
especially  his  cerebral  inheritance,  plus  his  actual  physical  en- 
vironment, plus  his  social  heritage  and  atmosphere.  The  modicum 
of  originality  and  self-determination  in  most  selves  is  small.  But 
the  synthetic  spiritual  principle  is  there  and  operates,  and  in  some 
few  persons  it  rises  to  signal  creativity.  Even  the  humblest  person 
has  his  own  unique  flavor  of  personality.  We  are  not  here  discuss- 
ing the  problem  of  freedom  of  the  will,  but  it  is  evident  that  such 
freedom  is  limited  in  range  and  rather  rare  in  its  expression,  if  it 
takes  place  at  all.  It  is  at  best  a  power  of  choice  that  can  be 
exercised  only  among  a  very  limited  number  of  determinate  pos- 
sibilities, and  it  is  not  obvious  that,  thus  far,  our  theory  of  the  self 
logically  involves  the  admission  of  any  indeterminism  in  the  self. 
It  may  be  that  the  activities  and  possibilities  of  the  spiritual  prin- 
ciple are  just  as  specifically  determined  by  its  "original  nature," 
plus  physical  and  social  milieus,  as  are  the  mechanical  activities 
of  the  body. 

APPENDIX 

mr.  bradley's  criticism  of  the  self 

In  his  chapters  on  "The  Meanings  of  Self,"  and  "The  Reality  of 
Self"  in  Appearance  and  Reality  (Chapters  9  and  10),  Mr.  Bradley, 
after  an  acute  discussion  of  the  various  senses  of  the  term  "self," 
concludes  that  the  foundation  of  the  self  is  the  inner  and  changing 
core  of  feeling  resting  mainly  on  what  is  called  Coenesthesia ;  but  this 

8  The  biological  elements  of  the  self  may  be  called  Mendelian  unit-char- 
acters. 


THE  NATURE  OF  THE  SELF  313 

core  of  feeling  is  dependent  on  the  not-self  and  the  boundaries  be- 
tween self-feeling  and  the  not-self  are  constantly  shifting.  There 
are,  however,  he  thinks,  elements  in  the  self  which  never  are  not- 
self;  "elements  in  the  central  self -core  which  are  never  made  objects, 
and  which  practically  cannot  be"  (p.  23  of  the  first  edition).  "Selves 
exist  and  are  identical  in  some  sense"  (p.  104) ;  the  unity  of  feeling 
never  disappears  (p.  110).  We  may  reflect  upon  the  unity  of  feeling 
and  say  that  the  self  as  self  and  as  not-self  all  in  one  is  our  object, 
but  the  actual  subject  is  never  brought  before  itself  as  an  object  and 
hence  the  subject  as  it  is  can  never  be  perceived  (p.  111).  The  so- 
called  experience  of  self-activity,  if  taken  to  be  a  revelation  of  the 
nature  of  the  self,  is  fraudulent  (p.  116).  The  monadic  theory  of 
the  self  is  useless,  since,  if  we  admit  that  the  monadic  selves  are  in 
relation  their  independent  reality  is  ruined ;  and  if  we  deny  that  they 
are  in  relations  and  at  the  same  time  assert  that  there  is  more  than 
one  monad  we  have  contradicted  ourselves,  since  even  plurality  and 
separateness  are  relations.  Moreover,  without  relations  the  monad 
is  useless,  since  it  is  in  no  relation  to  the  actual  process  of  self-feel- 
ing; if  it  is  in  relation  to  the  latter  it  is  no  longer  a  monad.  Mr. 
Bradley  concludes  that  the  self,  although  the  highest  form  of  ex- 
perience which  we  have,  is  not  a  true  form  since  it  gives  us  only 
appearances ;  like  all  other  forms  of  finite  existence  it  carries  us  away 
into  a  maze  of  terms  and  relations  (pp.  119,  120). 

Mr.  Bradley  is  right  in  his  contentions — (1)  that  the  whole  self 
can  never  be  object  for  itself  and  that  there  is  always  an  unanalyzable 
remainder  of  self-feeling;  (2)  that  the  self  exists  only  in  relations; 
(3)  that  the  theory  of  the  self  as  a  changeless  self -identical  monad 
is  a  fictitious  monster;  (4)  that  the  notion  of  the  self  is  a  reflective 
construction.  But,  when  Mr.  Bradley  substitutes  for  the  self,  or 
better  for  a  community  of  selves,  the  notion  of  an  absolutely  harmoni- 
ous timeless  experience  which  no  experient  has,  as  the  Absolute,  he  is 
foisting  upon  us  a  more  fictitious  monster.  Experience  is  a  construct 
made  by  abstraction  from  experients.  What  can  a  perfect  all-inclus- 
ive, timeless  experience  mean?  I  cannot  see  that  the  reality  of  my 
selfhood  is  invalidated  by  my  inability  ever  to  make  my  whole  self 
an  object  of  perception,  any  more  than  I  can  see  that  my  inability 
to  perceive  now  more  than  a  part  of  my  study  and  a  fragment  of  the 
street  makes  the  external  world  unreal.  As  to  activity  I  can  find  no 
item  of  experience  that  more  successfully  resists  a  dissolving  analysis 
than  the  activity  of  purposive  thinking.  Feelings  of  muscular  effort 
may  be  resoluble  into  peripheral  sensations,  but  not  purposive  think- 
ing. Moreover,  just  as  the  reality  of  physical  energy  is  legitimately 
inferred  from  physical  work  done,  so  the  reality  of  mental  energy 


314  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

is  legitimately  inferred  from  mental  work  done.  If  Mr.  Bradley  is 
not  a  self -active  thinker  how  are  we  to  account  for  his  very  important 
works?  For  me  the  self  is  a  dynamic  reality  living  in  relations. 
Personal  identity  is  variable  both  in  extent  and  intent,  but  that  per- 
sonal identity  exists  at  all  evidences  the  active  reality  of  a  self  which 
is  continuous  and  is  a  power  of  synthesis  realizing  itself  in  the  actual 
history  of  the  empirical  "me/ 


5? 


CHAPTER  XXIV 


CONSCIOUSNESS 


Strictly  speaking,  consciousness  cannot  be  defined,  since  it  is 
an  ultimate  or  irreducible  quality  of  experience,  as  belonging  to 
individuals,  and  hence,  cannot  be  stated  in  terms  of  anything  other 
than  itself.  In  order  to  know  consciousness  one  must  be  capable 
of  self-consciousness,  just  as  in  order  to  know  light  or  color  one 
must  be  able  to  reflect  upon  what  one  sees  as  well  as  to  see.  It 
is  possible,  however,  to  describe  consciousness  quite  accurately  by 
certain  notes  or  marks. 

In  discussing  the  nature  of  consciousness  it  must  be  borne  in 
mind  that  there  is  no  such  thing  as  consciousness  in  general.  Con- 
sciousness is  the  property  of  an  individual  organism.  Moreover, 
to  be  conscious  is  to  experience  something.  This  chapter  might 
have  been  entitled  "the  nature  of  experience."  I  use  the  terms 
consciousness  and  experience  as  equivalent.  I  proceed  to  state  the 
notes  of  consciousness  or  experience. 

1.  Consciousness  is  awareness  and  always  of  something  more 
or  less  determinate.  2.  In  man,  consciousness  includes  the  possi- 
bility of  being  aware  of  awareness — self-consciousness.  3.  Con- 
sciousness has  degrees  of  clearness  or  vividness.  It  varies  in 
intensity.  4.  It  has  duration  or  temporal  order.  5.  It  has  degrees 
of  expansiveness  or  inclusiveness.  6.  It  includes  feelings  or 
affects  which  are  reactions  of  the  subject  to  stimuli.  Feeling 
impulses  express  what  the  self  is  dynamically.  To  be  a  self  is 
primarily  to  feel  and  act.  7.  Thus  consciousness  involves  interest, 
desire,  valuation,  preference  and  choice.  8.  Thus  consciousness 
is  dynamic.  The  nature  of  the  conscious  self,  as  the  striving 
towards  harmony  and  continuity  of  life,  is  constituted  by  the 
organization,  into  trains  of  purposive  activity,  of  its  central  and 
abiding  interests,  values  or  selective  'preferences. 


315 


316  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

I.    The  Unity  of  Consciousness 

The  conscious  self  is  a  complex  unity,  a  system  of  systems,  a 
moving  complex  made  up  of  many  lesser  complexes  or  clusters  of 
impulses,  images,  ideas  and  purposes.  A  self  always  consists  of 
many  partial  selves,  and  the  degree  in  which  these  partial  selves 
are  integrated  into  one  harmonious  whole  varies.  Actually  every 
self  is  a  quasi-society,  more  or  less  harmonious,  of  partial  selves. 
Selves  consist  of  partial  selves  and  the  individual  self  consists  of 
the  total  relations  between  bits  of  selfhood.  With  the  details  of 
this  problem  we  shall  deal  more  fully  later.  What  sort  of  complex 
unity  is  then  a  conscious  self?  It  is  a  dynamic  unity,  one  which 
has  its  being  only  in  process,  in  unifying.  But  so  is  a  material 
machine  as  a  going  concern.  Still  more  emphatically  so  is  a 
biological  organism.  What  are  the  differences  between  machines, 
organisms  and  conscious  selves? 

a.  The  unity  of  a  machine  in  operation  consists  of  the  ex- 
ternal action  upon  one  another  of  parts  juxtaposed  in  space.  It 
is  true  that,  through  friction,  the  actions  of  the  parts  modify  one 
another.  The  wearing  down  by  friction  consists  in  the  disintegra- 
tion of  parts  into  looser  aggregates  of  particles  that  were  only  in 
lesser  degree  external  to  one  another  than  the  parts  which  they 
made  up.  There  are  governing  parts  in  a  mechanical  system, 
springs  in  a  watch,  for  instance,  but  their  action,  too,  is  relatively 
external  to  one  another. 

b.  In  a  living  organism  we  have  a  type  of  system  or  complex 
intermediate  between  a  machine  and  a  conscious  self.  The  life 
of  the  organism  seems  to  pulsate  through  all  the  parts  and  each 
part  to  contribute,  by  its  functioning,  to  the  life  of  the  whole.  The 
whole  pervades  all  the  parts  and  each  part  exists  as  such  only  in 
the  whole.  The  living  organism  cannot  be  assembled  and  taken 
apart  like  an  automobile.  Each  organ  is  a  complex  which,  in 
turn,  is  an  element  in  the  organic  complex  of  the  whole.  So  it  has 
been  customary  to  describe  the  unity  of  self-conscious  individuality 
as  an  organic  system.  But  the  analogy  is  not  complete.  Parts  and 
by-products  of  the  living  organism,  such  as  nails,  mucus,  hair, 
are  constantly  being  transformed  into  more  or  less  mechanical 
aggregates  and  cast  off.  Single  organs  may  be  removed  without 
apparently  seriously  affecting  the  life  of  the  whole.  The  organism 
is  a  self-repairing  machine,  and  where  it  cannot  restore  a  lost  part 


CONSCIOUSNESS  317 

another  part  may  take  over  the  function  of  the  lost  organ.  On 
the  other  hand,  in  the  conscious  self  the  unity  completely  inter- 
penetrates the  parts,  and  the  parts  are  not  parts  in  a  mechanical 
sense,  since  they  interpenetrate  one  another  in  a  transpatial  sys- 
tem. There  are  no  elements  in  consciousness  except  as  distinguish- 
able aspects  of  the  single  unitary  pulse  of  individual  experience. 
Thus  the  uniquely  systematic  character  of  consciousness  is  revealed 
as  completely  pervading  and  living  in  all  its  aspects.  Whatever 
may  be  the  degree  in  which  consciousness  may  be  continuous  in 
time  at  any  moment,  the  unity  of  consciousness  is  one  and  inde- 
feasible, a  system  living  in  and  through  its  elementary  and  partial 
systems.  Thus  a  mental  or  spiritual  unifying  process  is  sui 
generis;  all  other  forms  of  unity  and  individuality  are  more  or 
less  external  in  comparison  with  it.  Consciousness  is  both  syn- 
thetic and  analytic.  In  any  single  phase  or  moment  of  its  life, 
one  or  another  of  its  features  may  predominate,  but  never  to  the 
total  exclusion  of  the  others. 

II.    Consciousness  and  Its  Objects 

In  book  I  we  considered  the  relation  between  thought  and  its 
objects.  So  I  shall  only  briefly  indicate  it  here.  The  objects  of 
awareness  may  be:  sense  qualities  in  the  physical  world;  one's 
own  feelings  and  practical  ends ;  or  abstract  principles  as  in  logic, 
mathematics,  metaphysics.  In  every  case  awareness  is  deter- 
minate.    It  is  of  something  specific. 

Our  further  conception  of  consciousness  is  to  be  reached  in 
terms  of  its  relationships.  I  have  said  that  consciousness  is  a 
unique  property  of  experience  as  individuated.  In  the  broadest 
sense  of  this  very  vague  term  "experience,"  all  content  of  experi- 
ence is  present  to  conscious  subjects  and,  hence,  involves  con- 
sciousness. My  experience  of  the  pencil,  the  paper,  or  the  desk, 
is  at  least  a  fact  of  my  consciousness,  whatever  else  it  may  be.  But 
the  pencil,  the  paper,  or  the  desk,  are  not  in  my  consciousness  in 
the  same  sense  in  which  they  are  in  actual  space.  They  are  present 
to  my  consciousness  in  that  relation  which  constitutes  them  objects 
of  my  individual  awareness.  To  have  identified  this  relation  of 
awareness  with  the  general  concept  of  immediate  existence,  and 
to  have  argued  from  this  identification  that,  since  everything 
known  is  present  to  a  consciousness,  therefore  everything  existent 


318  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

is  content  or  matter  of  consciousness,  has  been  the  fallacy  of 
psychological  idealism.  The  habit  of  speaking  of  everything  that 
one  is  conscious  of  as  "content"  has  led  to  the  fallacious  notion  of 
consciousness  as  a  nonspatial  container  of  spatial  things.  Follow 
this  notion  to  its  logical  conclusion  and  everything  disappears  into 
one's  head,  and  one's  head  in  turn  disappears  into  a  dimensionless 
point. 

The  desk  exists  for  my  consciousness  now.  This  does  not  mean 
that  the  actual  desk  is  nothing  but  a  state  of  my  being  conscious. 
It  does  mean  that,  thus  far,  my  being  conscious  depends  on  a  rela- 
tion of  my  ego  to  the  desk,  which  I  believe  to  exist  also  when  I  am 
not  conscious  of  it.  Thus  far,  my  consciousness  is  relational;  it 
is  the  end  term  in  a  relation.1  Thus  far,  to  be  an  object  of  con- 
sciousness is  to  be  in  the  relation  of  meaning.2  In  order  that 
there  may  be  consciousness  there  must  be  qualities  and  relations 
of  objects,  which  may  also  exist  independent  of  a  subject's  con- 
sciousness. But  consciousness  is  a  very  unique  or  specific  kind  of 
end  term  in  a  relation.  A  single  pulse  of  consciousness  is  depend- 
ent, for  its  actual  constitution,  on  the  awareness  of  the  actual 
objects  and  relations  which  constitute  its  data.  When  I  am  con- 
scious of  the  desk,  my  concrete  consciousness  depends  on  the  rela- 
tion of  the  desk  to  my  ego.  Consciousness  is  always  a  function 
of  a  self,  and  a  self  exists  only  in  relation,  just  as  an  object  in 
space,  for  instance,  exists  in  relation  to  another  spatial  object.  A 
self  is  a  focalizing  center  of  relationships.  Whether  I  am  con- 
scious of  the  spatial  relations  of  objects,  such  as  that  of  the  desk 
to  the  paper,  or  of  social  relations  such  as  that  of  myself  to  my  son, 
or  of  logical  relations  such  as  equality,  inequality,  difference, 
identity,  contradiction,  consistency;  in  every  case  there  are  three 
factors;  namely  (1)  the  specific  objects  or  object  of  consciousness, 
which  may  be  (a)  particular  facts  either  psychical  or  physical  or 
(&)  relations  between  particular  facts  such  as  causal,  class  and 
quantitative  relations,  or  psychical  values;  (2)  the  unique  relation 
in  which  the  specific  objects  of  consciousness  stand  to  the  individ- 
ual self  who  is  conscious  in  these  specific  relations;  and  (3)  the 
attitude  of  the  self  which  can  know  itself  in  these  relations.  And 
it  makes  no  essential  difference  in  the  situation  whether  the  objects 

1 F.    J.    E.    Woodbridge,    The    Journal    of    Philosophy,    Psychology,    and 
Scientific  Methods,  Vol.  ii,  pp.  119-127. 
2  Ibid. 


CONSCIOUSNESS  319 

of  one's  being  conscious  are  physical  objects  or  processes  of  one's 
own  consciousness.  In  both  cases  the  fundamental  relation  is  the 
same — consciousness  is  the  attitudinal  relation  of  awareness  of  an 
ego  to  its  objects  which,  therefore,  need  not  be  conscious.3  This 
relation  is  not  a  causal  relation  nor  one  of  reciprocal  dependence 
of  existence,  hence  the  object  may  exist  independent  of  the  aware- 
ness by  the  ego. 

If  there  were  nothing  to  be  conscious  of,  I  should  not  be  con- 
scious. The  converse  proposition  is  not  true.  To  convert  "all 
consciousness  is  of  objects  and  their  relations"  into  aall  objects 
and  relations  exist  only  when  they  are  for  consciousness"  is  to 
commit  an  elementary  logical  fallacy. 

There  is  a  sense  in  which  consciousness  may  be  a  neutral  con- 
tinuum. When  one  is  not  reflecting  upon  what  it  means  to  have 
an  experience,  or  upon  the  relation  between  himself  as  agent  of 
experience  and  the  surrounding  world,  his  consciousness  is  a  con- 
tinuum which  seems  to  consist  just  of  a  mosaic  of  sense-data 
occupying  a  certain  spatial  field  and  moving  through  a  certain 
temporal  flux.  A  moment  ago  I  sat  looking  out  of  my  study 
window.  My  then  consciousness,  as  I  now  recall  it,  consisted 
simply  of  a  visual,  auditory,  tactual  and  olfactory  field  or  totum 
sensibile.  It  contained  the  awareness  of  the  window,  fragments 
of  the  room,  a  bit  of  the  street  with  vehicles  passing  along  it,  the 
raucous  toots  of  motor  horns,  the  noises  of  their  engines  and 
wheels,  bits  of  the  houses  on  the  opposite  side  of  the  street,  the 
odors  of  the  street  in  spring,  the  incense  ascending  from  my  pipe. 
My  consciousness  seemed  identical  with  the  aggregate  of  objects 
in  its  field.  It  seemed  nothing  more  than  the  compresence  of  this 
multitude  of  varied  sensory  objects.  This  is  the  realm  of  so-called 
"pure"  or  "neutral"  experience.  In  this  relation  consciousness 
appears  to  add  nothing  to  its  objective  field  of  contents  but  the 
colorless  compresence  of  its  parts  to  my  awareness.  "Pure  experi- 
ence" is  just  the  limiting  case  of  a  passive  consciousness  of  all 
sorts  of  things  in  a  spatio-temporal  continuum.  Consciousness 
seems  to  add  nothing  to,  and  to  subtract  nothing  from,  the  things. 
Its  goings  and  its  comings  appear  to  be  of  no  moment  to  them.  It 
seems  to  be  an  indefinitely  extensible  and  flexible,  nonresisting, 

*  It  follows  that  a  feeling  or  thought  is  never  conscious  of  itself.  Self- 
consciousness  is  the  awareness  by  the  thinking  self  of  some  part  of  it  own 
moving  content. 


320  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

colorless  and  translucent  medium,  through  which  all  sorts  of  things 
pass  and  which  changes  with  the  passing  of  its  contents.  So  far 
consciousness  seems  to  be  like  a  bit  of  pure  space. 

But  let  me  hear  a  scream  of  agony,  feel  a  sudden  pain,  see  a 
long  lost  friend  crossing  the  street,  or  think  of  a  pressing  practical 
problem,  and  the  whole  situation  is  immediately  altered.  I 
straightway  become  a  conscious  agent,  doer,  sufferer,  planner, 
thinker.  The  lights  and  shadows  of  my  conscious  content  change. 
I  alter  the  contents  and  pattern  of  my  presentational  continuum. 
In  short  I  become  actual  as  an  attentive,  feeling,  conational  self. 

If  consciousness  existed  in  general,  apart  from  individuated 
centers,  or  if  it  passed  through  and  around  these  as  the  daylight 
through  and  around  objects,  it  might  never  seem  more  than  a 
neutral  continuum.  But  consciousness  never  really  exists  as  a 
neutral  and  impersonal  vessel  or  continuum.  There  is  no  such 
entity  as  consciousness.  It  is  always  a  property  of  individual 
selves,  who  are  at  once,  and  all  the  time,  both  cognitive  experients 
and  affectional  agents.  As  experients  these  agents  are  recipients 
of  sensory  presentations  or  percepts;  as  active  or  attentive  selves 
they  selectively  analyze  and  reconstruct  their  presentations;  and 
as  affectional  they  desire,  value,  and  strive  voluntarily. 

I  agree  with  James  Ward  that  there  are  three  distinct  com- 
ponents of  the  psychical  process — attention,  feeling,  and  objects  or 
presentations — constituting  always  one  concrete  mental  process. 
A  mind  is  an  individuated  experient  which  lives  in  two  kinds  of 
attitudes — (1)  receptive  and  (2)  active.  In  the  receptive  attitude 
the  attentive  consciousness  is  incited  by  external  stimuli ;  that  is, 
it  is  nonvoluntary  determined.  In  the  active  attitude  attentive 
consciousness  is  determined  by  centrally  originated  feelings  of 
which  volition  is  a  complex  or  highly  elaborated  form.  Of  course, 
these  attitudes  interplay  in  the  most  varied  manner.  Attention  is 
a  name  for  the  cognitive  activity  of  the  conscious  individual,  by 
virtue  of  which,  whether  the  activity  be  directed  towards  an  object, 
through  the  self's  internally  initiated  desires  and  valuations,  or 
through  the  arousing  impact  of  environmental  stimuli,  the 
presentation  (percept)  or  representation  (image  and  concept)  of 
the  object  is  increased  in  intensity  and  clearness.  Attention  is  a 
specific  form  of  self-activity  whose  differentia  consists  in  the  fact 
that  by  it  cognition  is  enhanced  and  clarified.  Attentive  cognition, 
desire,  and  volition  are  all  species  of  the  genus  self-activity. 


CONSCIOUSNESS  321 

James  argued  that  experience  is  primarily  "pure"  or  "neu- 
tral." 4  This  pure  experience  is  the  stuff  of  which  everything  in 
the  world  is  composed.  Referring  to  the  common  distinction  made 
between  the  physical  and  the  psychical  as  two  qualitatively  dif- 
ferent fields,  James  says,  "Experience  has  no  such  inner  duplicity ; 
and  the  separation  of  it  into  consciousness  and  its  content  comes 
not  by  way  of  subtraction  but  by  way  of  addition."  5  "The  same 
bit  of  pure  experience  is  viewed  as  a  physical  thing  or  a  conscious 
process  according  to  the  relations  in  which  it  is  taken.  My  pencil 
as  a  part  of  the  system  of  external  space  relations  is  a  thing ;  as  a 
part  of  the  continuous  flow  of  my  imagery  it  is  a  conscious  content. 
Personal  histories  are  processes  of  change  in  time."  6  "A  'mind' 
or  'personal  consciousness'  is  the  name  of  a  series  of  experiences 
run  together  by  certain  definite  transitions,  and  an  objective  reality 
is  a  series  of  similar  experiences  knit  by  different  transitions."  7 
Consciousness  is  thus  a  function  of  certain  groupings  of  this  pure 
experience.  This  function  is  simply  the  taking  of  certain  bits  of 
experience  in  certain  relations. 

I  agree  with  James  to  the  extent  that  consciousness  is  a  func- 
tion of  the  individual  organism.  And  a  conscious  individual  is  a 
being-in-relation.  It  is  correct  to  say  that  consciousness  means 
concrete  facts  of  experience  taken  in  certain  relations,  with  specific 
transitions,  etc.  But  this  is  not  the  whole  story.  A  thing-experi- 
ence is  not  precisely  the  same  thing-experience  in  different  rela- 
tions. Relations  are  essential  elements  in  the  texture  of  thing- 
experiences. 

Consciousness  is  not  an  end  term  in  a  relation  in  the  same  sense 
in  which  a  desk  or  an  algebraic  symbol  is  an  end  term,  nor  is 
consciousness  a  continuum  like  space.  Consciousness  is  a  function 
of  individual  centers  of  cognitive-volitional  relationship  and  of 
related  elements  of  experience ;  which  stand,  respectively,  in  the 
relation  of  being  conscious  of  objects,  and  of  being  objects  of 
consciousness.  This  may  sound  like  a  very  pompous  platitude; 
but  it  is  nevertheless,  I  think,  the  statement  of  the  ultimate  situa- 
tion in  regard  to  cognition.8 

*  William  James,  Essays  in  Radical  Empiricism. 
8  Ibid.,  p.  9. 
•Ibid.,  p.  48. 
'  Ibid.,  p.  80. 

8  The  cognitive  relationships  of  consciousness  or  ''thought"  and  its  various 
classes  of  objects  I  have  already  discussed  in  Book  i. 


322  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

Consciousness  then  is  a  function  rather  than  an  entity.  But 
I  would  insist  that  it  is  a  function  or  attitude  of  a  unique  kind  of 
entity  in  unique  relations;  namely,  a  self  or  subject'  Whatever 
be  the  specific  character  of  the  things,  or  relations,  or  things-in- 
relation,  which  constitute  the  immediate  objects  of  one's  being 
cognitively  conscious,  to  such  objects  there  must  be  added  the 
uniqueness  of  the  relation  which  consists  in  their  being  for  a  con- 
scious self,  in  order  that  justice  may  be  done  to  the  nature  of 
experience.  Experience  without  the  self  is  like  the  tragedy  of 
Hamlet  without  the  Prince. 

What  does  the  relating?  What  makes  or  sustains  the  transi- 
tions? Of  what  is  consciousness,  as  thus  described,  a  function? 
James's  theory  seeks  to  lay  the  ghosts  of  the  dualisms  of  mind  and 
body,  of  thought  and  physical  things,  of  immanent  experiencing 
subject  and  transcendent  object,  which  have  annoyed  philosophers 
for  centuries.  But  the  theory  has  an  artificial  simplicity.  The 
question  bobs  up  once  more,  what  makes  the  difference  between 
those  relations  and  transitions  in  experience  which  constitute  a 
personal  biography  with  a  consciousness,  and  those  which  consti- 
tute the  same  bits  of  pure  experience  physical  objects?  Is  it 
simply  the  difference  between  organized  and  unorganized  material 
systems?  Is  it  the  difference  between  those  which  have  nervous 
systems  and  those  which  have  them  not?  Or  is  it,  perhaps,  the 
difference  due  to  a  specific  complexity  of  nervous  system  ?  When 
we  raise  these  questions  we  are  back  again  with  the  old  problem  of 
mind  and  body.  The  attempt  to  "side-step"  dualism  by  invoking  a 
neutral  world  of  pure  experience  evades  the  issue.  I  do  not  say 
that  dualism  is  the  last  word  in  this  matter.  But  whether  one  call 
consciousness  a  function,  or  something  else,  it  has  an  "inner 
duplicity,"  which  cannot  be  evaded. 

"In  order  that  there  should  be  an  experience,  it  is  not  suf- 
ficient that  qualities  and  relations  should  be  or  be  there ;  it  is 
likewise  necessary  that  they  should  be  in  a  recognizable  and  identi- 
fiable synthesis.  The  synthesis  is  an  actual  factor  of  experience."  9 
Consciousness  is  always  individual,  and  it  is  capable  of  becoming 
aware  of  itself  as  such.  We  are  conscious  in  relations,  and  we  are 
capable  of  being  conscious  that  we  are  conscious,  as  well  as  con- 


•E.  B.  McGilvray,  in  Journal  of  Philosophy,  Psychology  and  Scientific 
Methods,  Vol.  vi,  p.  230. 


CONSCIOUSNESS  323 

scious  of  the  specific  relations  in  which  we  are  conscious.  Any 
theory  of  experience  which  fails  to  take  due  account  of  the  prin- 
ciple that  it  is  the  ego  which  makes  the  transitions  and  recognizes 
the  relations,  which  constitute  a  "personal"  history,  is  inadequate. 
The  synthetic  function  of  conscious  selfhood  remains  the  central 
fact  in  the  world  of  experience.  The  individual  is  an  "I,"  a 
subject  of  experience,  which  can  never  be  reduced  to  the  particular 
and  changing  contents  of  his  experience.  To  say  "his,"  or  even 
"its,"  experience,  implies  an  ego  of  some  sort.  Let  one  try  to 
give  a  circumstantial  account  of  a  day's  experiences,  with  all 
reference  to  the  conscious  self  left  out,  and  he  will  see  what  tire- 
some absurdities  the  denial  of  the  ego  lands  him  in.  James  him- 
self frequently  referred  to  the  fact  that  personal  consciousness  is 
a  continuum;  for  example,  "personal  histories  are  processes  of 
change  in  time  and  the  change  is  one  of  the  things  immediately 
experienced." 10  "Change  in  this  case  means  continuous  as 
opposed  to  discontinuous  transition."  "Practically  to  experience 
one's  personal  continuum  is  to  know  the  originals  of  the  ideas  of 
continuity  and  change."  But  this  implies  that  the  self  is  a  syn- 
thetic principle  which  grasps  together  a  succession  of  contents,  and 
knows  itself  as  the  active  power  which  does  this  work.  What  the 
self  functions  as,  namely,  as  an  individual  focus  of  relationships, 
and  knows  itself  to  function  as,  is  what  the  self  is. 

The  standpoint  of  James  on  this  matter  of  a  virginal  experi- 
ence as  the  original  reality  which  apparently  both  antedates  and 
transcends  the  dualistic  impurity  of  common-sense  thinking  is 
closely  akin  to  the  standpoint  of  Mach,11  and  still  more  to  that 
of  Avenarius.12  I  am  not  clear  as  to  whether,  when  we  are  babies, 
who  have  come  "trailing  clouds  of  glory"  from  the  world  of  pure 
experience,  we  sport  in  the  ocean  of  pure  experience,  which  later 
is  falsely  bifurcated,  as  "shades  of  the  prison  house  begin  to  close 
upon  the  growing  boy,"  and  as  to  whether  the  undifferentiated 
neutrality  is  restored  by  the  simple  use  of  the  word  "neutrality." 
Is  pure  experience  what  we  set  out  with,  or  is  it  what  we  arrive 
at,  after  having  wandered  long  in  the  mazes  of  duality  and  un- 
neutrality  ?  Or  is  it  both  ?  I  know  not.  But,  since  James'  dark 
hints  have  been  taken  up  and  further  developed  in  the  writings 

10  James,  ibid.,  pp.  48  and  50. 

u  Analyse  der  Empfindungen:    translation,  Analysis  of  the  Sensations. 

13  Der  Menschliche  Weltbegriff,  and  Kritik  der  reinen  Erfahrung. 


322  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

Consciousness  then  is  a  function  rather  than  an  entity.  But 
I  "would  insist  that  it  is  a  function  or  attitude  of  a  unique  kind  of 
entity  in  unique  relations;  namely,  a  self  or  subject.'  Whatever 
be  the  specific  character  of  the  things,  or  relations,  or  things-in- 
relation,  which  constitute  the  immediate  objects  of  one's  being 
cognitively  conscious,  to  such  objects  there  must  be  added  the 
uniqueness  of  the  relation  which  consists  in  their  being  for  a  con- 
scious self,  in  order  that  justice  may  be  done  to  the  nature  of 
experience.  Experience  without  the  self  is  like  the  tragedy  of 
Hamlet  without  the  Prince. 

What  does  the  relating?  What  makes  or  sustains  the  transi- 
tions? Of  what  is  consciousness,  as  thus  described,  a  function? 
James's  theory  seeks  to  lay  the  ghosts  of  the  dualisms  of  mind  and 
body,  of  thought  and  physical  things,  of  immanent  experiencing 
subject  and  transcendent  object,  which  have  annoyed  philosophers 
for  centuries.  But  the  theory  has  an  artificial  simplicity.  The 
question  bobs  up  once  more,  what  makes  the  difference  between 
those  relations  and  transitions  in  experience  which  constitute  a 
personal  biography  with  a  consciousness,  and  those  which  consti- 
tute the  same  bits  of  pure  experience  physical  objects?  Is  it 
simply  the  difference  between  organized  and  unorganized  material 
systems  ?  Is  it  the  difference  between  those  which  have  nervous 
systems  and  those  which  have  them  not?  Or  is  it,  perhaps,  the 
difference  due  to  a  specific  complexity  of  nervous  system  ?  When 
we  raise  these  questions  we  are  back  again  with  the  old  problem  of 
mind  and  body.  The  attempt  to  "side-step"  dualism  by  invoking  a 
neutral  world  of  pure  experience  evades  the  issue.  I  do  not  say 
that  dualism  is  the  last  word  in  this  matter.  But  whether  one  call 
consciousness  a  function,  or  something  else,  it  has  an  "inner 
duplicity,"  which  cannot  be  evaded. 

"In  order  that  there  should  be  an  experience,  it  is  not  suf- 
ficient that  qualities  and  relations  should  be  or  be  there ;  it  is 
likewise  necessary  that  they  should  be  in  a  recognizable  and  identi- 
fiable synthesis.  The  synthesis  is  an  actual  factor  of  experience."  9 
Consciousness  is  always  individual,  and  it  is  capable  of  becoming 
aware  of  itself  as  such.  We  are  conscious  in  relations,  and  we  are 
capable  of  being  conscious  that  we  are  conscious,  as  well  as  con- 


•  E.  B.  McGilvray,  in  Journal  of  Philosophy,  Psychology  and  Scientific 
Methods,  Vol.  vi,  p.  230. 


CONSCIOUSNESS  323 

scious  of  the  specific  relations  in  which  we  are  conscious.  Any 
theory  of  experience  which  fails  to  take  due  account  of  the  prin- 
ciple that  it  is  the  ego  which  makes  the  transitions  and  recognizes 
the  relations,  which  constitute  a  "personal"  history,  is  inadequate. 
The  synthetic  function  of  conscious  selfhood  remains  the  central 
fact  in  the  world  of  experience.  The  individual  is  an  "I,"  a 
subject  of  experience,  which  can  never  be  reduced  to  the  particular 
and  changing  contents  of  his  experience.  To  say  "his,"  or  even 
"its,"  experience,  implies  an  ego  of  some  sort.  Let  one  try  to 
give  a  circumstantial  account  of  a  day's  experiences,  with  all 
reference  to  the  conscious  self  left  out,  and  he  will  see  what  tire- 
some absurdities  the  denial  of  the  ego  lands  him  in.  James  him- 
self frequently  referred  to  the  fact  that  personal  consciousness  is 
a  continuum;  for  example,  "personal  histories  are  processes  of 
change  in  time  and  the  change  is  one  of  the  things  immediately 
experienced." 10  "Change  in  this  case  means  continuous  as 
opposed  to  discontinuous  transition."  "Practically  to  experience 
one's  personal  continuum  is  to  know  the  originals  of  the  ideas  of 
continuity  and  change."  But  this  implies  that  the  self  is  a  syn- 
thetic principle  which  grasps  together  a  succession  of  contents,  and 
knows  itself  as  the  active  power  which  does  this  work.  What  the 
self  functions  as,  namely,  as  an  individual  focus  of  relationships, 
and  knows  itself  to  function  as,  is  what  the  self  is. 

The  standpoint  of  James  on  this  matter  of  a  virginal  experi- 
ence as  the  original  reality  which  apparently  both  antedates  and 
transcends  the  dualistic  impurity  of  common-sense  thinking  is 
closely  akin  to  the  standpoint  of  Mach,11  and  still  more  to  that 
of  Avenarius.12  I  am  not  clear  as  to  whether,  when  we  are  babies, 
who  have  come  "trailing  clouds  of  glory"  from  the  world  of  pure 
experience,  we  sport  in  the  ocean  of  pure  experience,  which  later 
is  falsely  bifurcated,  as  "shades  of  the  prison  house  begin  to  close 
upon  the  growing  boy,"  and  as  to  whether  the  undifferentiated 
neutrality  is  restored  by  the  simple  use  of  the  word  "neutrality." 
Is  pure  experience  what  we  set  out  with,  or  is  it  what  we  arrive 
at,  after  having  wandered  long  in  the  mazes  of  duality  and  un- 
neutrality  ?  Or  is  it  both  ?  I  know  not.  But,  since  James'  dark 
hints  have  been  taken  up  and  further  developed  in  the  writings 

10  James,  ibid.,  pp.  48  and  50. 

u  Analyse  der  Empfindungen:   translation,  Analysis  of  the  Sensations. 

13  Der  Menschliche  Weltbegriff,  and  Kritik  der  reinen  Erfahrung. 


326  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

encing  ego  in  time  how  is  one  to  account  for  a  present  temporal 
belief  in  a  nontemporal  fact  or  principle,  such  as  a  logical  or 
mathematical  principle,  an  ethical  value  or  a  scientific  law  ?  (4) 
How  can  there  be  introspection  or  self-consciousness,  how  can 
awareness  of  awareness  exist,  if  awareness  be  simply  a  selective 
response  of  the  nervous  system  to  neutral  elements  ?  Can  a  search- 
light search  its  own  searchings?  (5)  Neutral  monism  fails  to 
give  a  tenable  theory  of  error.  How  can  there  be  wrong  judg- 
ments concerning  the  relations  of  neutral  elements,  if  conscious- 
ness is  only  the  passively  illuminated  field,  a  cross  section  of 
certain  complexes  of  neutral  elements  in  relation?  It  is  a  far- 
fetched explanation  of  error  to  say  that  the  nervous  system  selects 
as  real  certain  relations  between  elements,  which  relations  are 
really  unreal.     What  does  this  proposition  mean  ? 17 

(6)  What  does  the  illuminating?  What  makes  the  selective 
response  ?  The  organism  or  the  nervous  system,  we  are  told.  But 
these  are  either  mere  physical  complexes,  or  they  are  physical 
complexes  plus  attentive  consciousness  or  mental  activity.  If  they 
are  the  latter  we  have,  not  neutral  monism,  but  a  duality-in-unity. 
If  they  are  the  former  we  have,  not  neutral  monism,  but 
materialism. 

Thus  neutral  monism  is  not  neutral.  It  is  either  a  new  and 
specious  name  for  materialism,  or  it  is  a  plausible  way  of  glossing 
over  the  duality  of  subject  and  object.  Either  the  neutral  ele- 
ments which  compose,  by  joint  action,  the  nervous  system  are 
just  physical  elements,  or  there  is  a  hyper-physical  principle  of 
selective  synthesis. 

(7)  Neutral  monism  involves  psychological  atomism  (Holt 
sees  this).  But  atomism  is  untrue  to  the  unitary  nature  of  self- 
activity  and  self-feeling.  It  is  really  an  attempt  to  revive 
Hume's  philosophy  of  the  self  as  a  bundle  of  atomistic  "impres- 
sions" and  their  copies.  But  what  does  the  bundling,  the  shifting 
of  the  field  of  illumination  ?    Hume  was  more  logical.    He  averred 

"  I  am  aware  that  Holt  makes  a  brave  attempt  to  dispose  of  these  objec- 
tions, but  to  my  mind  his  explanations  only  reveal  the  more  clearly  the  arti- 
ficiality of  the  whole  procedure  of  neutral  monism.  Holt  attempts  to  explain, 
in  terms  of  neutral  entities,  knowledge  of  the  past  and  future,  especially  of 
the  past,  and  the  fact  of  error.  I  have  not  space  here  to  examine  his  argu- 
ments, and  I  must  content  myself  with  inviting  the  reader  to  compare  the 
explanation  of  knowledge  of  the  past  and  future  and  of  error  given  on  the 
basis  of  neutral  monism,  and  that  given  in  the  present  work  on  the  hypothesis 
that  the  conscious  self  is  a  temporally  active  knower  and  purposive  agent. 


CONSCIOUSNESS  327 

that  he  did  not  know.  He  saw  that  the  nervous  system  could  be 
nothing  but  a  bundle  of  impressions,  too.  Even  a  searchlight  is  a 
planned  and  unitary  machine  assembled  by  one  who  thinks  himself 
a  purposive  unifier  of  physical  elements.  Someone  plays  it  over 
objects  for  a  specific  purpose. 

Either  the  light  of  consciousness  is  nothing,  no  one  assembles 
or  works  it,  and  it  reveals  nothing  since  there  is  nothing  to  reveal ; 
or  it  is  a  product  of  the  nervous  system  (materialism)  ;  or  it  is 
a  function  of  a  psychophysical  entity  (my  own  view  and  the  view 
of  all  who  believe  in  an  ego). 

Neutral  monism  is  only  a  new  kind  of  materialism,  parading 
in  the  guise  of  a  multitude  of  tiny  and  bloodless  logical  "entities" 
or  "absolutes."  Paraphrasing  Bradley's  well-known  words,  reality 
is  not  an  unearthly  ballet  of  bloodless  "terms"  and  "propositions," 
even  though  these  be  inconsistently  endowed  with  the  power  of 
generation.18 

Another  recent  attempt  to  make  a  novel  definition  of  conscious- 
ness is  that  of  moderate  or  functional  behaviorism.  Immoderate 
behaviorism  denies  to  consciousness  any  genuinely  verifiable  func- 
tion. Functional  behaviorism  defines  consciousness  as  the  margin 
or  fringe  in  adaptive  reactions,  where  instinct  and  pure  habit  are 
inadequate.  The  function  of  the  brain  is  to  coordinate  responses, 
and  consciousness  is  thus  a  correlation  between  bodily  processes 
and  changes  in  the  objects.  It  is  the  sign  of  the  specific  kind  of 
brain  activity  that  has  to  do  with  the  correlation  of  stimulus  and 
response  at  points  where  instinct  and  pure  habit  are  inadequate.19 

Selective  determination  and  redirection  of  behavior  by  a  future 
that  is  made  present  in  perception  (and  imagination),  "control  by 

18  In  evidence  of  the  justice  of  my  criticism  I  make  the  following  further 
citations  and  references: 

"Its  processes  (the  nervous  system)  are  of  a  mathematical  and  neutral 
structure,  just  as  much  as  the  path  of  a  ray  of  light  is  a  function  of  densities, 
temperatures,  magnetic  deflections,  and  indices  of  refraction — neutral  entities 
all,  and  unidentifiable  with  any,  even  the  smoothest  atoms  of  Democritus. ' ' 
(Holt,  The  Concept  of  Conscimisness,  p.  255.) 

"But  just  as  in  the  sciences  of  physics  and  chemistry  these  physical 
entities  are  seen  on  analysis  to  be  aggregates  of  logical  or  neutral  entities,  so 
that  the  physical  processes  are  simply  not  describable  as  a  movement  of 
material  particles  but  are  strictly  mathematical  manifolds."  (Cf.  Holt,  op. 
cit.,  Chaps.  7,  11,  12,  especially,  p.  255.) 

19  Taken  almost  verbatim  from  Bode,  "The  Definition  of  Consciousness," 
Journal  of  Philosophy,  Psychology  and  Scientific  Methods,  Vol.  x  (1913),  pp. 
232-239.  See  "The  Method  of  Introspection,"  the  same  journal  and  volume, 
pp.  85-91  and  "Consciousness  and  Psychology"  in  Creative  Intelligence. 


328  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

a  future  that  is  made  present,"  is  what  constitutes  consciousness. 
"A  perceived  object  is  a  stimulus  which  controls  or  directs  the 
organism  by  results  which  have  not  yet  occurred,  but  which  will, 
or  may,  occur  in  the  future;  .  .  .  the  future  is  transferred  into 
the  present  so  as  to  become  effective  in  the  guidance  of  be- 
havior." 20 

Clearly  this  view  is  right  to  the  extent  that  attentive  conscious- 
ness is  a  concomitant  in  the  making  of  responses  to  novel  stimuli, 
that  is,  the  meeting  of  new  situations  by  the  organism.  It  is  right 
in  finding  a  distinctive  quale  of  consciousness  to  be  teleological 
adaptation  by  anticipation,  through  which  the  future  becomes 
operative  in  the  present.  But  this  is  not  the  whole  story.  This 
conception  of  consciousness  is  too  narrow  to  cover  all  the  facts. 
The  functions  of  consciousness  are  not  exhausted  in  meeting  novel 
situations,  and  controlling  behavior  by  reference  to  the  future. 
When  I  am  enjoying  a  delightful  aesthetic  experience,  an  object 
in  nature  or  art,  or  contemplating  with  satisfaction  the  symmetry 
and  harmony  of  a  mathematical  construction  or  the  logical  struc- 
ture of  any  intellectual  system,  or  "living"  in  the  past  with  some 
significant  historical  period,  event  or  character,  my  consciousness, 
keen,  vivid,  and  delightful,  may  have  no  reference  to  my  own 
future  behavior  or  that  of  anyone  else.  This  pragmatic  or  instru- 
mentalist conception  of  consciousness  errs  by  taking  one  impor- 
tant function  of  consciousness  and  making  it  the  sole  function  to 
the  exclusion  of  other  worthful  functions.  Disinterested  contem- 
plation and  enjoyment  of  an  experience  for  its  own  sake  can  be 
called  "behavior"  only  in  a  very  Pickwickian  sense ;  and  yet  it  is, 
for  some  human  beings  at  least  (and  I  believe  for  many  in  one 
form  or  other),  one  of  the  most  significant  and  worthful  functions 
of  being  conscious.  "For  to  admire  an'  for  to  see,"  although  "It 
never  done  no  good  to  me,"  is,  in  the  words  of  Kipling's  Ulysses 
of  The  Seven  /Seas,  a  joyful  and  persistent  function  of  conscious- 
ness. 

The  conscious  ego  is  active  in  the  organization  of  experience. 
Even  in  receiving  and  recognizing  sensations  the  self  is  active  in 
some  small  degree.  It  is  active,  in  much  higher  degree,  in  organ- 
izing, classifying,  and  connecting  causally  and  teleologically  its 
rudimentary  experiences.     In  the  purposive  processes  by  which 

20  Bode,   ' '  Consciousness  and  Psychology, ' '   Creative  Intelligence,   p.   244. 


CONSCIOUSNESS  329 

ends  are  formulated  and  realized,  in  both  practical  and  theoretical 
life,  the  conscious  activity  of  the  ego  is  most  fully  manifested. 
In  brief,  consciousness  is  the  function  of  selective  response, 
finding  of  meanings,  and  creative  purposive  synthesis,  by  which 
the  psychophysical  self  is  able  to  effect  new  arrangements  in  ex- 
perience to  meet  novel  situations  in  its  physical  or  social  environ- 
ment or  in  its  own  inner  psychophysical  content ;  and  thus  to 
create,  maintain  and  enhance  the  enjoyed  values  o*f  experience. 

III.    The  Idealistic  Theory  of  Consciousness 

Objective  idealists  such  as  Fichte,  Hegel,  Green,  Bosanquet 
and  Royce  find  in  mind  or  self-conscious  individuality  at  its 
highest  level  a  key  to  the  structure  of  reality.  Bosanquet,  for 
example,  finds  in  mind  the  true  system  of  oneness  in  manyness, 
of  the  harmony  of  sameness  and  otherness,  of  self  with  self,  of  the 
solution  of  the  contradictions  in  experience.  In  short,  mind  is  the 
true  type  of  dynamic  and  significant  organization  of  parts  into  a 
living  system,  of  the  continuous  realization,  through  the  unrest  of 
negativity  and  the  conquest  thereof,  of  a  harmonious  whole  or 
individuality.  Thus  mind  is  the  key  to  the  structure  and  meaning 
of  the  entire  cosmos.  Whether  this  claim  be  justified  must  be  left 
unquestioned  for  the  present.21 

Certainly  the  idealistic  conception  of  the  nature  of  conscious, 
individuality  contains  a  profound  truth  and  must  be  included  in 
any  philosophy  that  is  to  be  adequate  to  the  whole  meaning  of 
experience.  Self-conscious  individuality  is  dynamic  and  social, 
the  self  develops  in  interplay  with  other  selves  and  with  the 
physical  order.  The  continuity  of  the  self's  life  is  found  in 
rational  valuation  and  .purposive  activity.  This  life  involves  a 
dialectic  process.  Negativity,  the  practical  and  theoretical  recog- 
nition of  oppositions  or  differences  between  self  and  not-self  (other 
selves  and  the  physical  order)  is  a  prime  condition  for  the  growth 
and  maintenance  of  selfhood.     The  development  and  maintenance 


21  See  further,  book  v,  ' '  Cosmology  or  the  General  Structure  of  Eeality. ' ' 
The  following  are  important  references  for  the  idealistic  conception  of 
consciousness:  F.  H.  Bradley  Appearance  and  Eeality,  especially  chapters  14, 
15,  19,  26;  J.  B.  Baillie,  The  Idealistic  Construction  of  Experience ;  B.  Bosan- 
quet, The  Principle  of  Individuality  and  Value,  especially  Lecture  vi;  J.  S. 
McKenzie,  Elements  of  Constructive  Philosophy,  especially  Book  ii,  Chaps.  6, 
7,  8,  10  and  11 ;  Josiah  Boyce,  The  World  and  the  Individual,  Index. 


330  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

of  self-conscious  individuality  is  thus  the  process  of  transcending 
the  actually  attained  selfhood,  the  process  of  ever  finding  the  one 
in  the  other,  of  overcoming  the  opposition  between  self  and  other ; 
which  opposition,  so  far  from  being  an  insoluble  contradiction,  is 
rather  the  play  of  difference  or  contrast  within  the  nature  of  life 
and  mind  itself.  Thus  mind,  regarded  as  equivalent  to  self- 
consciousness,  is  a  systematic  and  developing  unity  which  realizes 
itself  and  maintains  itself  by  continually  going  beyond  itself,  by 
apparently  negatiug  itself,  by  dying  unto  itself  in  an  other  than 
self.  Self  and  not-self,  the  individual  and  its  other,  have  no  mean- 
ing or  existence  when  sundered  from  one  another.  The  opposition, 
the  conflict  between  self  and  other,  is  not  the  impassable  separation 
of  two  absolute,  incompatible  and  different  kinds  of  reality.  This 
opposition  is  the  prime  condition  of  self-realization  through  self- 
transcendence. 

The  idealist  finds  in  the  stubborn  and  resisting  character  which 
physical  nature  presents,  a  phase  of  the  otherness  or  negativity  by 
which  the  self  in  transcending  its  already  achieved  character 
realizes  itself.  The  qualities  of  brute  matter,  the  struggle  for 
existence,  pain,  disease,  and  death,  are  incidents  necessary  to  the 
development  of  souls.  The  dialectic  of  selfhood  is  even  more 
rationally  and  continuously  manifested  in  man's  social  life  than 
in  man's  relations  with  physical  nature.  Every  social  relation  into 
which  the  self  enters  involves  the  dialectic,  the  otherness ;  that  is, 
the  interplay  of  differing  beings.  Only  by  overcoming  the  opposi- 
tion between  self  and  the  other  self  in  love  and  marriage,  in  the 
community  life,  the  vocational  life,  the  national  life,  the  religious 
life,  can  personality  live  and  develop.  "He  that  seeketh  his  life 
shall  lose  it  and  he  that  loseth  his  life  shall  find  it."  The  self 
which  tries  to  evade  these  relationships,  which  gives  no  hostages  to 
fortune,  which  buries  its  one  talent  in  the  ground,  which  takes  no 
risks,  which  tries  to  live  like  the  epicurean  wise  man,  by  shutting 
itself  off  as  far  as  possible  from  all  relationships  which  may  dis- 
turb its  equanimity,  thereby  shuts  itself  off  from  the  possibility 
of  true  self-realization.    Life  is  an  obstacle  race. 

This  is  what  Hegel  means  by  the  power  of  negativity  as  the 
moving  spirit  of  life  and  mind.  In  maintaining  one's  physical 
well-being,  in  learning  and  discovering,  in  living  in  social  relations 
as  a  member  of  the  family  and  community,  the  individual  finds 
his  true  selfhood  only  in  going  outside  of  his  own  selfhood  and  in 


CONSCIOUSNESS  331 

discovering  his  true  nature  in  the  other.     Spinoza  said  all  deter- 
mination is  negation  or  limitation.     The  objective  idealist  adds 
that  all  negation  involves  affirmation.     Consequently,  only  through 
negation  or  limitation  is  limitation  transcended.     Logically,  all 
genuine  negative  judgments,  that  is,  all  that  are  more  than  mere 
word  play,  involve  correlative  affirmative  judgments.      One  can 
deny  that  a  specific  attribute  inheres  in  a  subject  only  if  one  be 
aware  that  some  other  positive  attribute  incompatible  with  the 
attribute  denied  inheres  in  the  subject.     If  I  say,  for  instance, 
that  to-day  is  not  cold,  I  imply  that  it  has  a  positive  quality  in- 
compatible with  coldness.     If  I  say  that  A  is  not  honest,  I  say  by 
implication  that  he  has  a  positive  quality  incompatible  with  hon- 
esty.    On  the  other  hand,  affirmative  judgments  imply  correlative 
negative  judgments.     If  to-day  is  warm,  it  is  not  cold.     If  A  is  a 
thief,  he  is  not  honest.     Reality,  as  object  of  thought,  must  be  a 
coherent  system  of  differences  or  correlative  individual  elements. 
Thus  affirmation  and  negation  are  two  sides  of  the  same  whole  of 
judgment.     The  objective  idealist  widens  the  application  of  this 
logical  principle  to  the  whole  of  life.     Xegation  is  a  dynamic 
quality  of  conscious  life  taken  as  a  whole.     If  reality  were  a  static 
and  lifeless  system,  then  the  power  of  the  negative  would  be  an 
illusion.     The  dynamic  quality  of  negation  means  that  reality  has 
a  living  and  spiritual  character,  that  it  is  a  concrete  system  of 
interrelated  selves.     If  reality  be  rational,  if  it  moves  through 
and  by  the  activity  of  spirit,  negation  is  an  essential  phase  of 
reality;  for  the  power  of  the  negative  consists  in  the  continuous 
self-differentiation  of  individuality  as  a  living  member  of  a  system 
of   individuals.      Self-conscious   individuality   can    develop   only 
through   conflict,   through   opposition,   which   issues   in   the   pro- 
founder  union  and  positive  growth  of  selves  in  social  relations.    In 
the  ethical  realm  the  self  becomes  a  spiritual  reality,  it  serves 
intrinsic  values,  only  through  meeting  and  overcoming  the  opposi- 
tion between  reason  and  nature,  between  impulse  and  the  social 
ethos,  between  itself  and  other  selves.     It  is  through  the  conflict 
within  its  own  bosom,  which  is  reflected  in  the  conflict  in  its  social 
relations,  that  the  self  wins  at  the  same  moment  internal  harmony 
and  social  harmony,  and  only  through  this  process  is  ethical  per- 
sonality  developed.      Feeling  depends   for   its   enlargement    and 
enrichment,  by  the  attainment  of  a  richer  and  more  comprehensive 
harmony,  on  the  fact  that  in  its  higher  forms  it  is  an  experience 


332  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

of  harmony  in  difference  which  overcomes  and  holds  in  solution 
the  opposition  or  contrast  of  individualities.  Such  states  of  feel- 
ing are  preeminently  love  and  friendship.  That  these  states  of 
feeling  are  harmonious  and  pervasive  unions  of  differences,  that 
they  always  hold  in  concentrated  solution  the  element  of  negation, 
is  shown  by  the  intensity  and  suddenness  with  which  they  may  pass 
into  their  opposites. 

In  religion  the  development  of  spiritual  experience  through 
the  overcoming  of  opposition  reaches  its  climax.  The  finite  self 
becomes  conscious  of  itself  as  an  apparently  independent  being, 
then  conscious  of  its  sinfulness,  misery  and  worthlessness  as  in- 
volved in  such  independence ;  it  denies  itself  in  the  presence  of  the 
absolute  and  perfect,  and  in  this  very  self-denial,  this  humiliation, 
this  overcoming  of  selfhood,  this  dying  to  live,  the  finite  self  be- 
comes renewed  and  uplifted,  it  becomes  one  with  the  infinite  and 
perfect.  And,  on  the  other  hand,  the  absolute  self,  as  concrete  living 
spirit,  must  find  its  own  life,  as  self-expressive  activity  and  love, 
in  and  through  the  lives  of  the  society  of  individual  and  finite 
members  of  reality. 

At  the  outset  of  its  career  the  self  has  only  being-in-itself.  It 
is  only  a  potential  personality.  It  becomes  an  actual  personality, 
a  spiritual  individual,  through  the  dialectic  by  which,  in  finding 
an  other  than  its  present  desire,  passion  or  aim,  in  the  conflicting 
desires  within  itself,  in  conflict  with  physical  selves,  in  the  clash 
with  other  wills,  it  becomes  able  to  identify  itself  with  the  other, 
to  expand  itself  into  union  with  the  other,  and  thus  to  attain  a 
being  in-and-for-itself,  to  return  into  itself  enriched  by  its  self- 
alienation  and  self-denial  in  its  world.  The  most  familiar  experi- 
ences of  the  othering  or  dialectic  process  are  to  be  found  in  friend- 
ship, love,  social  and  political  life,  the  life  of  the  family.  Art, 
religion,  science,  and  philosophy  are  themselves  more  subliminated 
stages  in  the  othering  process  by  which  the  self,  not  finding  else- 
where full  satisfaction  of  the  craving  for  conscious  union  with  the 
universe,  finds,  in  the  expression  of  its  ideals  in  sensuous 
materials  (art),  in  the  imaginative  forms  of  picture  thinking 
(religion)  and  finally  in  the  conceptual  forms  of  thought  (philos- 
ophy) wider  and  deeper  experiences,  of  its  membership  in  the 
universal  spiritual  order,  of  its  kinship  with  the  complete  spirit  of 
harmonious  thought. 

Thus  the  idealistic  doctrine  of  consciousness  or  experience  is 


CONSCIOUSNESS  333 

turned  into  a  metaphysic  or  cosmology,  by  the  identification  of  the 
significant  features  of  human  experience,  as  regarded  from  the 
point  of  view  of  the  dialectic  process,  with  the  meaning  of  reality 
as  a  whole.  Whether  this  identification  be  legitimate  is  a  question 
t6  be  considered  later.  We  shall  find  grounds,  as  we  proceed,  for 
holding  that  the  idealistic  interpretation  of  experience  ignores  cer- 
tain aspects  of  the  life  of  selfhood;  specifically,  that  it  tends  to 
merge  the  individual  self  in  the  absolute.  The  doctrine  of  the 
othering  process,  the  dialectic  of  life,  is  a  true  insight  in  regard 
to  the  nature  of  conscious  individuality.  But  it  is  not  the  whole 
truth.  In  the  measure  in  which  the  self  grows  into  full  person- 
ality, it  becomes  more  self-determining,  more  an  inner  focus  and 
self-moving  center  of  social  and  cosmic  relationships.  As  the 
center  of  its  individuality  increases  in  harmony,  so  its  radii  of 
relationships  are  enlarged.  The  richer  and  better  organized  a 
selfhood,  the  more  distinctive  and  central  and  uniquely  character- 
istic is  its  individuality.  Therefore,  I  shall  argue  later  on,  the 
world  of  selves  cannot  be  regarded  as  included  in  one  all-embracing 
self. 


CHAPTER  XXV 


THE    SUBCONSCIOUS 


If  we  picture  the  contents  of  consciousness  as  a  field,  like  the 
field  of  vision,  we  may  say  that  this  field  is  not  equally  illuminated 
at  all  points.  Between  its  vivid  center,  which  may  be  occupied  by 
a  feeling,  a  perception,  or  a  plan  of  action,  and  the  periphery,  at 
which  consciousness  ceases,  there  may  be  a  penumbra,  or  fringe, 
of  contents  of  which  one  is  only  dimly  aware  and  with  degrees  of 
dimness.  Relative  to  the  vividness  of  the  central  content,  the 
contents  which  are  in  the  shade  have  been  called  "subconscious." 
A  less  equivocal  designation  for  this  feature  of  consciousness  would 
be  subatbentive  or  vague  consciousness.  It  is  not  properly  called 
"subconscious,"  since  there  is  no  break  between  what  one  is  vividly 
conscious  of  and  what  one  is  more  dimly  aware  of.  In  any  pulse 
of  consciousness  all  its  distinguishable  features  are  parts  of  the 
total  state  of  being  conscious.1 

The  second  type  of  so-called  subconscious  process  consists  of 
elements  of  experience  that  are  not  actually  present  as  such  in  con- 
sciousness at  the  moment,  but  of  which  the  mind  may  become 
aware  by  attentive  memory  and  discrimination.  If,  when  writing, 
I  do  not  attend  to  the  sound  of  a  bell  ringing  or  a  clock  striking, 
and  ^an  afterwards  recall  the  sound,  it  is  argued  that  the  sound 
must,  at  the  time  of  its  occurrence,  have  entered  the  field  of  my 
experience  as  a  subconscious  content.  Again,  we  take  in  complex 
perceptual  and  affective  experiences  as  wholes  or  fused  masses, 
which  experiences  we  afterwards  analyze  into  their  elements.  One 
can  listen  to  a  violin  or  orchestra  as  a  total  musical  experience,  or 
one  can  analyze  the  music  into  its  component  tones.     Similarly, 

1  It  is  very  questionable  if  there  is  any  such  thing  as  wholly  inattentive 
consciousness.  The  focal  objects  of  clear  consciousness  may  be  shifted  with 
great  rapidity,  and,  in  this  shifting,  consciousness  may  carry  with  it  a  con- 
siderable mass  of  vague  details.  I  hold  that  clearness  of  consciousness  is 
equivalent  to  degree  of  attention ;  in  other  words,  that  attention  is  not  a 
special  power  or  phase  of  consciousness.  The  scope  and  degree  of  attention 
is  the  scope  and  degree  of  consciousness. 

334 


THE  SUBCONSCIOUS  335 

one  can  analyze  an  object,  perceived  as  a  combination  of  various 
sense-qualities,  into  sensations  of  form,  color,  touch,  smell,  taste. 
In  the  total  concrete  experience  these  sensational  elements  are  said 
to  be  subconsciously  present.  A  more  tenable  explanation  of 
facts  of  the  first  kind  is  that  the  past  stimuli,  which  I  did  not  per- 
ceive at  the  moment  of  receiving  them,  left  traces  in  my  brain ;  and 
that,  before  these  traces  have  become  too  weak,  I  can  shift  the 
emphasis  of  my  consciousness  and  thus  become  aware  of  the 
objects.  In  the  case  of  fused  perceptual  experiences  the  same 
principle  of  explanation  holds  good.  I  do  not  really  sensate  the 
separate  sensations  as  such,  unless,  by  attentive  analysis,  I  shift 
the  emphasis  of  my  consciousness,  and  then,  for  the  first  time  the 
separate  sensations  become  discriminated  contents  of  my  experi- 
ence. 

A  third  and  more  important  type  of  alleged  subconscious 
process  is  that  of  dissociated  or  "split-off"  ideas  and  systems  of 
ideas  present  in  the  same  body  without  mutual  awareness.  Pro- 
fessor Morton  Prince  found  in  his  case  of  Miss  Beauchamp 
and  others,  that  there  actually  coexisted,  along  with  the  primary 
or  dominating  consciousness,  other  active  systems  of  ideas,  with 
distinctive  characters  or  individualities,  of  which  the  primary  con- 
sciousness was  not  aware.  He  finds  that  these  phenomena  occur 
in  the  neatest  and  most  precise  form  and  "are  best  adapted  for 
experimental  study  in  so-called  automatic  writing  and  speech."  2 
"The  one  fundamental  principle  and  criterion  of  the  subconscious 
is,"  he  says,  "dissociation  and  coactivity."  3  And  the  point  at  issue 
he  rightly  says  is  this — do  ideas  ever  occur  outside  the  synthesis  of 
the  personal  self-co7isciousness  under  any  conditions,  whether  of 
normal  or  abnormal  life ;  so  that  the  subject  is  unaware  of  these  ? 
Many  investigators  agree  with  him  that  such  ideas  do  thus  occur. 
But  for  whom  do  those  ideas  occur  ?  Who  is  aware  of  them, 
besides  the  observer  who  assumes  their  existence  ?  Ideas  can  exist 
only  for  an  individual  consciousness.  If,  then,  co-conscious  com- 
plexes of  ideas  exist  this  means  that,  simultaneously,  there  must 
be  associated  with  one  brain  several  distinct  individual  centers  of 
consciousness  or  "souls."  There  must  be  quasi-independent  com- 
plexes of  percepts,  images,  affections,  and  purposes,  each  with  a 
unity  and  individuality  of  its  own. 

2  Journal  of  Abnormal  Psychology,  Vol.  ii,  pp.  69,  70. 
1  Ibid.,  Vol.  ii,  p.  78. 


336  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

The  evidence  for  these  co-conscious  systems  falls  under  the  fol- 
lowing rubrics:  (1)  The  multiple  personalities  discussed  in  the 
next  chapter;  (2)  automatic  writing;  (3)  the  anaesthesia  and  be- 
havior of  hypnotized  subjects  who,  in  the  post-hypnotic  condition, 
have  no  memory  of  what  occurred  to  them  when  in  the  hypnotic 
state;  (4)  the  post-hypnotic  fulfillment  of  suggestions,  given  while 
the  subjects  are  in  the  hypnotic  state.  These,  it  is  said,  may 
extend  to  blindness,  deafness,  and  general  insensibility  to  another 
person's  presence;  and  even  to  the  subject  playing  the  suggested 
role  of  an  entirely  different  individual;  (5)  the  counting  of  num- 
bers, drawing  of  figures,  etc.,  which  have  been  impressed  on  an 
anaesthetic  region  of  the  subject's  skin. 

It  is  argued  that  the  intelligence  and  purposiveness  of  subjects 
observed  under  these  conditions  require  the  assumption  of  a  sub- 
conscious self  or  secondary  'personality  to  account  for  them.  Now, 
it  seems  to  me  that  the  application  of  the  term  "personality," 
which  properly  refers  to  the  maximum  of  conscious  and  rational 
synthesis  in  our  psychical  life,  is,  in  such  cases,  a  misnomer.  I 
do  not  find  in  these  cases  sufficient  evidence  of  intelligence,  rational 
integration,  and  purposiveness,  to  merit  calling  them  "persons." 
Moreover  I  think  it  probable  that  many  of  these  phenomena  are 
due  to  simulation.  Many  of  them  do  not  require  the  invocation 
of  any  different  principles  than  those  involved  in  ordinary  physio- 
logical automatisms.  We  do  not  invoke  co-conscious  complexes  of 
ideas  to  explain  walking  through  crowded  streets  with  our  minds 
intent  on  things  very  remote  from  our  immediate  environment, 
writing  while  thinking  of  something  else,  or  the  anaesthesia  of  the 
football  or  lacrosse  player. 

There  is  no  line  of  mystery  separating  the  automatisms  and 
suggestibility  of  hypnotized  subjects,  or  even  multiple  selves,  from 
normal  experience.  We  are  all  to  a  very  large  extent  automata, 
and  to  an  equal  extent  suggestible  beings.  Our  manifestations  of 
individuality  undergo  mutation  from  year  to  year,  from  month  to 
month,  and  sometimes  even  from  hour  to  hour.  We  all  play  a 
variety  of  roles,  at  home,  in  business,  in  church,  in  politics,  at  the 
club,  on  a  vacation.  In  the  lives  of  normal  selves  single  feeling- 
impulses  and  groups  or  systems  of  feeling-impulses — love,  hate, 
anger,  lust,  passion  for  adventure,  desire  to  break  the  monotony 
of  existence,  to  run  amuck  of  convention — arise  frequently.  Ap- 
parently they  come  from  nowhere  and  intrude  themselves  into  the 


THE  SUBCONSCIOUS  337 

humdrum  of  consciousness,  often  with  surprising  suddenness  and 
strength. 

Below  the  well-defined  area  of  normal  conscious  life,  there  is 
the  ill-defined  and  teeming  region  of  unconscious  tendencies,  of 
blind  impulsions  and  vague  unrests,  of  biologically  determined 
instincts  and  appetites,  which  seem  to  be  psychical  as  well  as  bodily 
in  character;  in  short,  there  seems  to  be  a  deep  reservoir  of  uncon- 
scious psychical  energies,  which  constitute,  to  a  very  large  extent, 
the  spri?igs  of  our  conscious  life-activities. 

Further,  there  is  the  problem  as  to  how  our  memories,  acquired 
habits  of  thought  and  action,  highly  specialized  knowledge,  prac- 
tical powers  of  judgment  and  technical  skill,  persist  when  they  are 
not  in  conscious  operation?  Again,  what  are  we  to  say  of  sleep 
and  dreams  ?  What  becomes  of  the  psychical  self  in  deep  and 
dreamless  sleep  ?  Is  there  such  a  state  as  absolute  suspension  of 
thought,  or  does  the  soul  always  think,  even  in  dreamless  and 
profound  slumber  ?  Is  the  belief  that  we  were  wholly  unconscious 
simply  due  to  the  rapid  oblivescence  and  the  striking  break  of 
continuity  in  experience,  which  takes  place  on  our  waking  to  sur- 
roundings that  are  incongruous  with  the  fairy  land  of  the  dreaming 
life  of  slumber  ?  When  one  awakens  with  the  solution  of  a  difficult 
problem  that  was  left  unsolved  when  one  went  to  sleep,  did  the 
brain  think  without  the  mind,  did  it  in  short  carry  on  "unconscious 
cerebration"  ?  Or  was  the  mind  consciously  active  in  sleep,  and 
does  it  simply  forget  the  intermediate  steps,  when  the  conclusion 
becomes  clear  at  the  moment  of  waking?  Or  does  the  mind,  re- 
freshed by  rest,  undisturbed  by  any  train  of  conflicting  interests, 
and  with  the  last  train  of  predormant  conscious  activity  ready  to 
be  revived,  concentrate  on  the  problem,  when  it  awakens ;  and,  with 
enhanced  and  unimpeded  activity,  reach  a  solution  so  rapidly 
that  the  result  seems  to  come  instantaneously  and  out  of  the 
dark? 

Are  dreams  explicable  solely  in  terms  of  the  psychical  contents 
and  neural  stimuli  which  persist  from  the  day's  waking  life,  from 
the  internal  bodily  states  such  as  the  condition  of  the  digestive 
system  or  the  sexual  glands,  and  from  local  sense  stimuli,  such  as 
those  occasioned  by  lying  in  an  unusual  position  or  the  pressure 
of  some  protuberance  ?  Or  must  we  invoke  another  factor  in  the 
shape  of  unconscious  psychical  energies  which  have  lain  dormant 
or  suppressed  during  the  waking  life  ? 


338  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

Professor  Sigmimd  Freud,  in  his  book  Die  Traumdeutung, 
argues  very  effectively  for  the  view  that  dreams  are  suppressed 
wishes,  and  that  most  of  them  go  back  in  origin  to  the  repressed 
impulses  of  childhood  and  adolescence,  notably  to  the  sex  impulse, 
the  most  persistently  repressed  of  all  man's  primary  appetites. 
Professor  Freud's  argument  supports  very  strongly,  from  the  facts 
of  dream  life,  the  doctrine  of  persistent  unconscious  psychical 
complexes.  I  have  not  space  to  discuss  here  his  general  psycho- 
logical theory  as  based  on  his  study  of  dreams.  He  distinguishes 
three  types  of  psychical  life — the  conscious,  the  preconscious  which 
may  become  conscious,  and  the  unconscious. 

The  Freudian  theory  exaggerates  the  extent  to  which  the  char- 
acter of  personality  is  determined  by  unconscious  complexes.  In 
particular,  it  greatly  exaggerates  the  influence  of  suppressed  sex 
impulses.  This  is  a  case  of  the  neuropath's  fallacy.  Normal  per- 
sonality is  interpreted  in  terms  of  data  gathered  chiefly  from 
neurotics,  especially  neurotic  women.  The  grotesque  ingenuity 
with  which  Jung,  in  his  book  The  Unconscious,  twists  all  literature 
and  religion  into  expressions  of  the  libido  is  another  instance  of 
riding  a  theory,  based  on  human  abnormalities,  to  death.  The  indi- 
vidual whose  sex  life  is  a  healthy  part  of  a  well-balanced  person- 
ality does  not  suffer  much  from  suppression  complexes.  Un- 
doubtedly many  dreams  are  the  expression  of  thwarted  wishes,  but 
many  others  are  merely  the  consequence  of  the  free  play  of  mental 
association  started  by  some  casual  thought  or  experience  of  the  day 
before.  However,  Freud  and  his  school  have  brought  to  attention 
two  important  truths  in  regard  to  human  personality — 1,  that  the 
character  of  personality  is  determined  to  a  great  extent  by  its 
unconscious  constituents ;  2,  that  the  unconscious,  no  less  than  the 
conscious,  factors  of  personality  are  dynamic.  Indeed,  often  the 
unconscious  is  more  dvnamic  than  the  conscious. 

I  shall  later  argue  for  the  reality  of  unconscious  psychical  com- 
plexes on  more  general  grounds.  While  the  evidence  furnished 
by  a  careful  study  of  dreams  does  powerfully  support  the  belief 
in  an  unconscious  psychical  life  or  energy,  this  by  no  means  in- 
volves the  reality  of  the  so-called  "subconscious  self"  in  the  sense 
of  a  being  wiser  and  more  powerful  than  the  conscious  self. 
Granted  that  some  dreams  are  the  expression  of  repressed  desires, 
and  that  these  are  chiefly  infantile  in  origin  (I  am  not  ready  to 
admit  the  lalter  proposition  to  the  extent  which  Professor  Freud 


THE  SUBCONSCIOUS  339 

argues  for),  all  that  is  necessarily  implied  thereby  in  regard  to  the 
unconscious  is  the  persistence  in  the  adult  of  biological  impulses 
and  appetites.  The  organized  rational  and  moral  life  of  the  nor- 
mal adult  supervenes  upon,  and  is  indeed  the  transformation  of, 
the  primitive  biological  individuality,  through  the  influences  of 
cultural  training  and  intellectual  activity. 

The  possibility  of  "split-off  ideas"  or  "co-conscious  ideas"  may 
be  conceded,  but  their  actuality  is  not  established  by  the  evidence 
adduced.  The  purposiveness  and  intelligence  of  automatic  writ- 
ing, posthypnotic  suggestions,  and  so  forth,  would  be  equally  well 
accounted  for  on  the  Freudian  theory  of  unconscious  psychical 
energies.  The  latter  theory  does  not  involve,  as  does  the  former, 
the  assumption  that  "ideas"  can  exist  either  singly  or  in  complexes, 
apart  from  the  main  stream  of  consciousness.  Coconscious  ideas 
would  be  states  of  consciousness  existing  apart  from  any  personal 
knower.  But  such  a  notion  is  a  contradiction  in  terms.  If  real, 
they  would  involve  at  best  more  than  one  personal  knower  in  the 
same  body.  Such  an  assumption  is  both  improbable  and  super- 
fluous. That  several  mutually  independent  clusters  of  ideas  exist 
in  the  same  living  body  is  very  unlikely.  Their  existence  would 
involve  the  absence  or  suspension  of  the  principle  of  personal  syn- 
thesis and  memory,  without  which  there  can  be  no  consciousness 
and  no  ideas. 

We  have  now  to  embark  upon  the  quest  for  the  "subconscious 
self"  in  its  most  mystical  form.  In  support  of  the  reality  of  the 
distinct  subconscious  self  there  are  cited  the  cases  of  sudden  in- 
spiration, inventive  work,  improvisations,  and  creations  of  men  of 
genius,  who  have  written  great  poems,  composed  great  music,  or 
hit  upon  world-transforming  thoughts,  without  knowing  how  or 
why  they  did  these  things.  According  to  F.  W.  H.  Myers  and 
others,  the  subliminal  self  or  subconscious  self  is  the  great  wonder 
worker  in  the  realm  of  human  personality.  It  is  a  reservoir  of 
almost  unlimited  power,  wisdom,  and  insight.  It  is  not  a  far  cry 
from  the  assertion  of  the  subliminal  source  of  genius  and  of  all 
unusual  mental  achievements  to  its  invocation  as  the  real  agent  in 
automatic  writing,  prophetic  and  warning  dreams,  second  sight, 
telepathy,  and  the  supposed  veridical  messages  from  departed 
spirits.  Finally,  since  this  subliminal  self  is  unplumbable  in  its 
depths,  deathless,  and,  like  Melchisedek,  without  local  habitation 
or  parentage,  why  not  regard  it  as  our  organ  of  communication 


340  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

with  Deity ;  nay,  perhaps,  as  in  very  truth  the  absolute  cosmic  self 
speaking  in  and  through  our  fragmentary  selfhoods.4 

It  behooves  us  here  to  walk  warily  and  to  keep  all  our  critical 
wits  about  us.  There  is  probably  no  other  psychological  and  meta- 
physical conception  which  has  been  used  in  so  many  shifting 
senses,  or  that  has  been  made  the  catch-all  for  so  much  pseudo- 
science  and  mythology  as  that  of  the  "subconscious  self." 

The  concept  of  the  subconscious  is  properly  employed  as  a 
principle  of  interpretation  in  the  metaphysics  of  psychology  to 
designate  the  psychical  substrate  and  source  of  consciousness.  The 
inborn  and  acquired  powers  of  conscious  selfhood  seem  to  involve 
the  reality  of  a  subconscious  psychical  energy  or  life  as  their  sup- 
port and  ground.  The  development  of  congenital  capacities,  and 
the  acquisition  and  retention  of  new  powers  of  judgment  and 
action,  lead  to  the  hypothesis  of  neuro-psychical  dispositions,  in 
which  these  functions  and  capacities  are  conserved,  when  not  in 
actual  conscious  use,  and  grounded  when  in  actual  use.5  The  only 
alternative  to  this  view  is  the  hypothesis  that  the  structure  and 
processes  of  the  nervous  system  constitute  the  sole  conditions  of 
consciousness,  and  that  consciousness  arises  simply  when  neural 
processes  reach  a  specific  degree  of  intensity  and  complication. 
From  this  standpoint  the  enduring  or  substantial  basis  of  all 
mental  life  consists  of  neurograms,  that  is,  neural  paths,  in  the 
cerebral  cortex.  Unless  one  is  to  regard  the  central  nervous  sys- 
tem as  the  sole  conservator  and  condition  of  operation  for  all 
congenital  and  acquired  psychical  capacities,  including  the  most 
highly  developed  powers  of  trained  expert  judgment,  and  of  re- 
fined and  elevated  feeling,  one  must  admit  the  actuality  of  un- 
conscious neuro-psychical  dispositions  or  organized  potencies  of 
conscious  life.  At  any  moment  in  which  a  cross-section  of  our 
adult  conscious  life  may  be  envisaged  there  are  many  of  these 
dispositions  which  show  no  signs  of  conscious  activity.  Either 
the  powers  and  achievements  of  the  self,  which  are  not  explicitly 
in  consciousness  at  the  moment  of  experience,  are  conserved 
simply  and  solely  as  structural  modifications  of  nervous  tissues 


4  See  Myers'  Human  Personality  and  Its  Survival  after  Death;  also 
William  James,  The  Varieties  of  Religious  Experience. 

B  On  this  matter  compare  G.  F.  Stout,  Manual  of  Psychology,  passim,  and 
James  Ward,  article,  "Psychology,"  Encyclopedia  Britannica,  11th  ed.,  Vol. 
xxii,  p.  560. 


THE  SUBCONSCIOUS  341 

and  their  functioning;  or  they  represent,  in  addition,  functions 
of  an  immaterial  or  psychical  principle  of  activity  which  is  never 
fully  represented  in  the  momentary  awareness  of  the  self.  Both 
alternatives  present  almost  equal  difficulties  for  thought.  On 
the  one  hand,  how  shall  one  conceive  all  the  powers  of  poet  and 
artist,  all  the  garnered  wisdom  of  the  sage's  ripe  life,  all  the 
knowledge  and  expert  judgment  of  the  statesman  or  scientist,  as 
persisting  simply  in  the  structure  of  the  brain?  On  the  other 
hand,  how  shall  one  conceive  an  immaterial  and  unconscious  prin- 
ciple of  psychical  activity,  when  "psychical"  is  known  to  us  im- 
mediately in  the  form  of  consciousness  alone  ? 

A  final  decision  between  these  two  hypotheses  must  depend  on 
one's  general  metaphysical  theory  as  to  the  relation  between  mind 
and  brain.  I  shall  argue  later  that  the  view  which  assumes  at 
once  a  distinction  and  an  interdependence  between  mind  and  brain 
is  the  most  defensible  hypothesis.  If  one  accept,  as  I  do,  this 
duality-in-unity,  the  problem  as  to  how  our  psychical  dispositions 
persist  becomes  the  question  as  to  the  best  way  of  conceiving  the 
actuality  of  mental  functions  when  these  are  not  consciously  op- 
erative. I  find  the  most  satisfactory  conception  to  be  that  the 
mind  is  a  complex  principle  of  activity  or  psychical  energy,  no 
phase  of  which  is  ever  wholly  in  abeyance.  "The  soul  always 
thinks."  The  enduring  self  is  a  synthetic  principle  of  activity 
which  includes  more  than  is  in  consciousness  at  any  moment  and 
is  the  generating  principle  of  consciousness.  This  principle  of 
synthesis  is  immediately  known  in  self-feeling,  and  inferentially 
known  as  the  enduring  unifier  and  sustainer  of  all  capacities  to 
think  and  to  act  which  become  manifest  in  the  histories  of  selves. 
In  part,  then,  the  self  is,  at  any  instant,  unconscious.  It  sus- 
tains and  binds  together  successive  moments  in  the  empirical  con- 
sciousness. The  actual  self  is  a  principle  of  progressive  synthesis, 
a  continuously  active  power  of  neuro-psychical  organization,  which 
can  never  be  fully  revealed  in  any  single  instant  of  conscious 
feeling  and  activity. 

Precisely  to  what  extent  the  psychical  self  is  dependent  upon 
the  nervous  mechanism  for  the  conservation  and  development  of 
its  powers  we  cannot  say.  It  evidently  depends  on  neural  stimuli 
for  the  materials  and  occasions  on  which  it  reacts  with  percepts, 
images,  meanings,  volitional  acts,  and  emotions.  But  it  is  open 
to  one  to  maintain  that  the  results  of  these  reactions  persist  as 


342  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

the  neuro-psychical  dispositions,  and  that,  to  this  extent,  the  soul 
develops  capacities  whose  conservation  is  not  accounted  for  in 
terms  of  neural  action  alone.  The  unifying  and  sustaining  prin- 
ciple of  selfhood  is  active  in  the  successive  moments  of  conscious- 
ness, and  it  persists  in  sleep  and  in  other  states  of  so-called  uncon- 
sciousness; but  all  the  specific  modifications  of  the  soul,  in  the 
shape  of  habits,  memories,  trained  powers,  are  conditioned,  in 
their  development  and  expression,  by  modifications  of  the  struc- 
ture of  the  central  nervous  system. 

Accepting,  then,  the  reality  of  unconscious  psychical  disposi- 
tions, what  follows  in  regard  to  the  subconscious  ?  It  does  not 
follow  that  there  is  a  distinct  subconscious  self  in  each  individual, 
more  real  and  enduring  than  the  conscious  self.  For  these  endur- 
ing dispositions  to  feel,  judge,  and  act,  no  matter  how  multifari- 
ous and  significant  they  may  be,  are  yet  continuous  and  inter- 
woven with  the  individual's  conscious  life.  The  self  is  one  in  its 
potentially  conscious  and  its  actually  conscious  life.  When  I 
bring  to  bear  on  a  problem  a  trained  power  of  judgment,  which 
I  have  not  for  some  time  exercised,  my  conscious  life  still  pre- 
serves the  continuity  of  this  reawakening  function  with  the  domi- 
nant purposes  and  experiences  which  have  preceded  that  reawak- 
ening and  which  condition  the  emergence  of  the  new  act. 

Finally,  we  must  consider,  briefly,  the  mystical  doctrine,  al- 
ready referred  to,  of  a  subliminal  self;  gifted  with  extraordinary 
wisdom,  insight,  and  wonderworking  power,  and  which,  neverthe- 
less, engages  in  such  trivial  exercises  as  automatic  writing,  table 
rapping  and  tipping  et  hoc  genus  omne.  This  subconscious  self 
is  held  to  be  the  source  of  mankind's  most  significant  inspirations, 
and  achievements.  It  finds  its  chief  support  in  the  dubious  and 
misty  realms  of  so-called  "psychical  research." 

The  "subliminal  self"  is  invoked  to  explain  prophetic  and 
warning  dreams;  to  account  for  the  messages  conveyed  by  auto- 
matic writing  and  telepathy;  to  explain  the  inspirations  of  poets, 
prophets,  and  revealers ;  indeed,  to  account  for  all  genius  and  the 
supernormal  achievements  of  ordinary  persons;  finally,  as  the 
organ  through  which  we  may  hold  converse  with  the  spirits  of  the 
departed  and  with  Deity  or  the  all-inclusive  cosmic  self. 

Now,  to  take  up  these  points  in  reverse  order,  I  do  not  under- 
stand why,  since  my  waking  normal  consciousness,  humdrum  and 
commonplace  though  it  be,  is  the  form  of  psychical  activity  on 


THE  SUBCONSCIOUS  343 

which  I  must  depend  for  my  general  intellectual  and  moral  conduct 
in  everyday  life,  the  cosmic  self  and  the  spirits  of  the  departed 
should  ignore  it  and  choose  to  send  their  messages  only  through 
this  mysterious  and  uncertain  realm  of  subliminal  selfhood,  which 
occasionally  makes  an  eruption  into  the  experience  of  a  few  fa- 
vored individuals.  Surely  it  is  not  fair,  if  there  be  a  moral  and 
rational  economy  of  reality,  that  a  few  individuals,  not  otherwise 
remarkable  above  their  fellows,  should  enjoy  this  monopoly  of 
a  private  road  to  God  and  the  spirit  world !  Moreover,  the  char- 
acter of  the  messages  hitherto  received,  their  silly  inanity  and 
triviality  amounting  at  times  to  stupid  rot,  do  not  augur  well  for 
the  intelligence  and  sesthetic  capacities  either  of  the  subliminal 
self  who  serves  as  receiver  and  transmitter,  or  of  the  senders  of 
the  messages  on  the  other  shore  of  the  river  Styx.  However,  let 
us  suppose  that  veridical  messages  have  been  received  from  the 
dead,  by  the  method  of  cross-correspondences.6  These  messages 
purport  to  come  from  a  conscious  person,  and  to  be  transmitted 
through  the  medium's  organism  to  another  conscious  self.  All 
that  these'  messages  would  prove,  if  we  took  them  at  their  face 
value,  would  be  that  the  communicating  spirit  has  preserved  its 
personal  consciousness  and  that  a  controlling  self,  the  "Rector" 
or  "Imperator,"  for  example,  might  communicate  through  the 
brain  of  a  living  person.  It  might  be  possible  that  an  individual 
soul  could  use  several  different  brains  for  its  communications  with 
other  souls  but  it  is  highly  improbable  that  it  ever  does.  The 
subliminal  self  is  a  superfluous  hypothesis  in  this  connection. 
It  is  equally  superfluous  in  the  case  of  telepathy.  Let  us  suppose 
that  messages  are  actually  conveyed  and  sensations  felt,  across 
great  reaches  of  space;  say  that  almost  instantaneously  messages 
have  been  conveyed  from  India  to  England  or  America.  These 
messages  purport  to  come  from  conscious  selves  to  other  con- 
scious selves.  The  fact  that  they  may  be  uttered  through  auto- 
matic writing  only  serves  to  throw  doubt  on  their  genuineness, 
since  they  may,  in  these  cases,  be  produced  by  the  suggestion  of 
the  operator  himself,   or  of  the  recipient  on  the  operator,   or, 


"  On  this  matter  see  Hibbert  Journal,  Vol.  vii,  pp.  241  ff. ;  and  Proceedings 
of  the  (English)  Society  for  Psychical  Research,  Vol.  xx,  pp.  205-275;  xxi,  pp. 
219-391;  xxii,  pp.  19-416;  xxiv,  pp.  170-200,  201-253.  See  also  the  writings 
of  Sir  Oliver  Lodge,  and  James  H.  Hyslop ;  especially  the  latter 's  Contact  with 
the  Other  World.    Also  Henry  Holt,  On  the  Cosmic  Relations. 


344  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

finally  may  be  the  genuine  results  of  the  reputed  transmitter's  or 
"control's"  suggestion.  Admitting  a  genuine  telepathic  commun- 
ication between  say  India  and  America,  what  might  we  infer? 
Several  possibilities  would  be  open.  Either  that  minds  can  some- 
times act  directly  on  one  another  without  physical  media  of  com- 
munication; or,  that  there  may  be  an  unknown  physical  medium, 
by  means  of  which,  if  the  psychical  transmitting  and  receiving 
instruments  be  properly  attuned,  the  message  is  conveyed  and 
taken  up  with  great  rapidity.  Light  and  electricity  travel  very 
rapidly  and  the  action  of  gravitation  seems  to  be  instantaneous, 
why  not  the  physical  medium  of  telepathy  ?  The  third,  and  least 
intelligible  explanation  of  telepathy  is  the  distinct  subliminal  self. 

Possibly  all  so-called  telepathic  phenomena  will  turn  out  to 
be  the  results  of  either;  (a)  autosuggestion  by  the  medium,  as 
in  the  phenomena  of  hysteria,  or  (&)  hetero-suggestion  by  which 
the  recipient  of  the  message  influences  the  medium.  The  former's 
expectancy  may  be  the  chief  factor  in  producing  the  result.  "Psy- 
chical" individuals  have  a  suspicious  way  of  meeting  the  demands 
of  their  patrons  and  friends. 

It  is  extremely  difficult  to  determine  what  residuum  of  auto- 
matic writing  is  performed  without  the  cooperation  of  the  writer's 
consciousness.  Admitting  that  there  is  such  a  residuum,  its  modus 
operandi  need  not  differ,  in  principle,  from  the  automatisms  of 
hysterical  and  disorganized  selves;  it  may  be  like  the  secondarily 
automatic  processes  of  the  normal  self,  which,  when  first  learned 
and  practiced,  required  the  cooperation  of  attentive  consciousness ; 
but  which,  when  they  have  been  repeated  a  number  of  times,  come 
to  be  carried  out  without  voluntary  attention  thereto,  and,  con- 
sequently, without  clear  consciousness  thereof.  A  very  large 
fraction  of  the  phenomena  of  automatic  writing  is  thus  the  result- 
ant of  forgotten  experiences  which  arise  unbidden,  and,  without 
apparent  antecedent  grounds,  determine  the  course  of  the  writing. 
If  automatic  writing  does  really  sometimes  produce  results  inex- 
plicable by  the  writer's  previous  experience,  or  by  the  conscious 
suggestions  of  his  associates,  these  results  may  be  due  to  a  super- 
normal sensitiveness  to  the  mental  contents  of  some  one  present. 
Thus,  admitting  the  reality  of  unconscious  psychical  com- 
plexes, it  is  a  misnomer  to  designate  these  vague,  irregular,  shift- 
ing psychical  complexes,  which  are  expressed  in  automatic  writing, 
hypnotic  and  posthypnotic  suggestion,  disintegrated  individuality, 


THE  SUBCONSCIOUS  345 

and  so  forth,  as  true  selves  or  personalities.  These  phenomena 
bear  witness,  at  the  most,  to  temporary,  and  in  some  cases,  perma- 
nent mental  dissociation;  perhaps  conditioned  by  the  dissociation 
of  the  systems  of  neurones  whose  normal  associations  are  the  im- 
mediate physiological  basis  of  our  coherent  waking  consciousness.7 

We  do  not  get  forward  in  the  work  of  interpreting  the  mys- 
teries of  the  psychical  self,  and  its  relation  to  the  brain,  by  hypo- 
statizing  a  second  and  subliminal  self  and  endowing  it  with  tran- 
scendent powers.  This  type  of  explanation  is  on  a  par  with  the 
explanation  of  the  existence  of  various  species  of  plants  and  ani- 
mals by  saying  that  God  created  them,  or  the  relationships  of 
physical  bodies  by  saying  that  God  holds  them  together.  It  is  a 
clear  case  of  explaining  ignotum  per  ignotius. 

The  "unconsciousness"  with  which  genius  does  its  work  is  a 
well-worn  phrase.  The  expression  is  a  loose  designation  for  the 
swift  intuitive  energy  with  which  the  genius  goes  forward  to  his 
goal,  and  for  the  objectivity  of  his  mental  attitude  when  immersed 
in  creative  work.  There  is  danger  of  confusion  between  "unself- 
conscious"  and  unconscious.  It  does  not  mean  that  the  conscious 
individuality  of  the  genius  has  no  part  in  his  achievements,  and 
that  he  must  call  in  the  subliminal  self  to  account  for  them.  In- 
deed, such  a  vague  and  vast  subterranean  reservoir  of  psychical 
power  could  have  no  individuality,  no  bounds  or  specific  types  of 
creative  life.  The  genius  would  have  no  part  or  lot  as  an  individual 
in  his  work,  and  we  should  not  give  him  any  credit  or  attach  to 
the  fool  any  contempt  or  to  the  wicked  any  blame.  Everything 
must  be  all  the  same  in  the  subliminal  self.  If  this  self  is  wiser, 
better,  and  more  enduring  than  our  conscious  selfhood,  why  does 
it  not  do  something  to  live  up  to  its  reputation  as  prophet,  seer, 
and  general  wiseacre  ? 

If  the  subliminal  self  be  a  real  entity  it  presents  a  striking 
anomaly  in  the  evolution  of  organisms.  It  represents  a  reversal 
of  the  whole  course  of  vital  and  psychical  evolution.  The  evolu- 
tion of  animal  behavior  has  been  in  the  direction  of  increasing 
control  by  intelligent  consciousness.  And  the  evolution  of  con- 
sciousness has  been  in  the  direction  of  purposive  integration  of  the 
elements  of  experience  and  behavior  under  the  control  of  the  in- 
tellect.    Any  theory  of  personality  which  would  yield  control  to 

T Cf.  W.  McDougall,  Articles  on  "Hypnotism"  and  "The  Subliminal 
Self,"  Encyclopaedia  Britannica,  11th  Edition. 


346  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

the  subconscious  is  virtually  a  demand  that  we  reverse  the  course 
of  evolution  and  dethrone  the  intellect  or  reason  from  the  govern- 
ing and  directing  place  in  the  conduct  of  life.  The  fact  that  this 
proposal  falls  in  with  many  irrationalistic  tendencies  in  our  social 
life  to-day  does  not  recommend  it  to  me  the  more  strongly.  The 
conservation  of  culture  I  hold  to  be  bound  up  with  the  leadership 
of  reason.8 

The  entire  evolution  of  psychical  life  has  been  in  the  direction 
of  greater  mental  and  rational  integration.  And  we  are  asked 
to  believe  that  persons  who  suffer  frequent  lapses  from  this  ra- 
tional integration  and  control  are  under  the  guidance  of  a  higher 
wisdom,  just  as  savages  believed  the  insane  to  be  inspired.  We 
are  asked  to  believe  that  the  silly  inanities  of  the  automatic  writer, 
the  fairy  land  and  topsy-turvydom  of  dreams,  the  "spiritual" 
orgies  of  neurotics,  and  so  forth,  are  witnesses  to  the  true  nature 
of  the  self! 

Even  an  absolute  self  could  be  known  to  me  only  in  two  ways ; 
either  through  its  direct  intercourse  with  my  conscious  and  reflec- 
tive life,  or  by  my  inferring  it  as  a  hypothesis  which  harmonizes 
and  justifies  my  conception  of  reality  as  a  whole  with  special 
reference  to  the  meaning  of  human  life.  It  is  a  piece  of  thoroughly 
unscientific  mysticism  to  talk  of  tapping  the  subconscious  in  order 
to  get  into  contact  with  the  absolute  mind.  Such  a  procedure  is 
like  going  into  a  dark  cellar  to  get  a  look  at  the  sun.  Compared 
with  our  finite  personalities,  an  absolute  mind  must  be  an  intense 
and  concentrated  intuitive  consciousness,  a  super-personality. 

Whatever  does  not  enter  into,  and  is  not  fused  with  the  con- 
scious selfhood  of  man  we  may  consistently  relegate  to  the  realm 
of  the  organic  or  physiological  life.  Whatever  is  wholly  and  per- 
sistently unconscious  in  the  psychophysical  field  properly  belongs 
to  the  bodily  side  of  the  self. 

One  must  beware  of  introducing  surreptitiously  into  a  con- 
sideration of  the  empirical  nature  of  the  individual  a  metaphys- 
ical doctrine  which  has  been  fashioned  to  account  for  the  inter> 
relationships  of  mind  and  body  in  terms  of  a  panpsychistic  meta- 


8  Since  these  paragraphs  were  written  there  has  been  a  great  increase 
in  this  tendency,  due  to  the  psychic  strain,  anguish  and  bereavement  wrought 
by  the  World  War.  One  may  sympathize  deeply  with  the  mental  distress  of 
millions;  but  that  is  not  a  good  reason  for  losing  one's  head  over  spiritualism 
and  telepathy. 


THE  SUBCONSCIOUS  347 

physics.  The  problem  of  the  relation  between  the  unity  of  the 
self  and  the  facts  of  growth,  alteration,  and  aberration  in  the 
empirical  psychophysical  life  is  rendered  n©  whit  less  mysterious 
by  changing  the  terms  from  those  of  body  and  mind  into  those 
of  conscious  self  and  subconscious  self.  Indeed,  I  think  the  prob- 
lem is  thereby  hopelessly  complicated  and  confused.  I  may  be- 
lieve that  the  physical  order  does  not  exist  in  absolute  independ- 
ence of  mind  and  purpose,  and  that  in  personality  is  to  be  found 
the  best  key  to  the  meaning  of  the  world  process ;  but  such  a  belief 
need  not,  and  should  not,  be  based  on  the  hypothesis  of  the  sub- 
liminal self. 

The  subconscious  nuances,  the  various  normal  and  abnormal 
complexities,  of  selfhood,  must  not  blind  us  to  these  cardinal 
facts:  1.  Personality  is  a  continuous  principle  of  conscious  and 
growing  organization  of  psychophysical  impulsions ;  spiritual  as 
well  as  biotic.  2.  The  key  to  the  practical  growth  and  the  knowl- 
edge of  personality  is  to  be  found,  not  in  the  unconscious,  but  in 
the  clearest  and  fullest  exercise  of  reflection  and  rational  willing. 
We  know  the  rudiments  of  personality  in  our  awareness  of  our 
various  impulsions  as  constituent  members  of  our  selfhood.  The 
more  persistently  we  purpose  and  live  in  the  light  of  intelligence 
the  more  fully  do  we  become,  and  know  ourselves  as  becoming, 
personalities, 


CHAPTER  XXVI 


MULTIPLE    PERSONALITY 


There  is  another  class  of  facts  which  seem  to  militate  against 
the  belief  in  a  personal  unity  of  consciousness.  These  are  the 
pathological  facts  of  diseased  and  disintegrated  personalities;  of 
lapse  of  the  sense  of  individual  identity  for  considerable  periods ; 
of  alternating  selves  which  may  exist  contemporaneously  in  the 
same  individual  body ;  and  of  successive  selves  likewise  inhabiting 
the  same  body  in  succeeding  intervals  of  time. 

Of  these  phenomena  of  diseased  selfhood  there  are  a  number 
of  classic  and  well-known  cases.  Such  are  Professor  Binet's 
Leonie,  with  her  two  additional  individual  characters  which  dif- 
fered from  her  ordinary  selfhood,  and  could  be  induced  by  sug- 
gestion and  hypnosis;  Professor  Janet's  Felida,  and  Dr.  Weir 
Mitchell's  Mary  Reynolds;  more  recently,  Dr.  Morton  Prince's 
Miss  Beauchamp,  who,  he  states,  manifested  during  the  years 
in  which  he  studied  her  case,  four  well-marked  and  separate  selves, 
B  I,  B  II,  B  III,  B  IV ;  with,  at  times,  still  other  minor  variants. 
These  selves  oscillated  in  their  control  of  Miss  Beauchamp's  body 
and  actions.  Although  mutually  hostile  they  did  not,  for  the  most 
part,  know,  without  the  intervention  of  perceptive  symbols,  what 
one  another  felt  and  did.  In  other  words,  each  appeared  to  be 
a  private  self.  They  communicated  with  one  another  by  letter. 
At  times,  two  of  them  struggled  for  the  mastery.  Sometimes  the 
fight  was  three-cornered.  And  one  of  them  "Sally"  (B  II) 
claimed  to  have  developed  the  power  of  direct  intuitive  knowledge 
of  the  others.  These  "selves,"  as  described  by  Dr.  Prince,  were 
not  only  distinctive  in  character,  but  conflicting  and  consciously 
hostile  in  their  attitudes  towards  one  another.  This  case  then  is 
a  very  striking  instance  of  "alternating  personality." 

A  second  type  is  that  of  "lapse"  and  "succession"  of  person- 
alities. Typical  of  these  are  the  cases  of  the  Reverend  Ansel 
Bourne  and  the  Reverend  Thomas  C.  Hanna,  both  of  whom 
wandered  away  from  their  homes  and  occupations,  forgot  their 

348 


MULTIPLE  PERSONALITY  349 

individual  identities,  and  became,  for  a  time,  other  selves  with 
somewhat  different  names  and  other  occupations.1 

More  extreme  instances  of  the  lapse  of  personal  identity  are 
furnished  by  the  permanent  aberrations  of  insane  persons  who 
have  believed  themselves  to  be,  for  instance,  Jesus  Christ,  Julius 
Caesar,  or  Queen  Victoria,  or  even  a  Ley  den  jar  charged  with 
electricity. 

If  the  actual  self  be  thus  subject  to  dissociation,  aberration, 
and  complete  loss  of  the  sense  of  personal  identity,  can  there 
really  be  a  persisting  unity  in  human  personality?  I  hold  that 
such  cases  do  not  invalidate  our  theory  of  personal  identity.  The 
instances  rather  enforce,  by  extreme  examples,  the  principle  which 
is  substantiated  by  the  normal  history  of  selfhood,  when  consid- 
ered in  relation  to  its  elemental  instincts,  and  emotions.  That 
principle  is  as  follows :  the  empirical  self  is  a  complex,  imperfect, 
and  developing  organization  of  experiences  and  purposes,  which 
depends  upon  and  increases  through  the  activity  of  the  power 
of  rational  synthesis  by  which  the  congenital  and  modifiable 
psychical  elements  of  life  are  fused  into  a  more  unified  and  en- 
during system. 

Personality  is  a  dynamic  and  progressing  unity,  not  a  static 
and  ready-made  unity.  Personality  is  an  achievement  with  many 
grades  and  stages.  The  unity  of  the  empirical  self  is  won  by 
organizing  the  physicopsychical  elements  of  individuality.  The 
pure  or  formal  ego  is  the  power  of  synthesis,  through  which  this 
organization  is  effected.  To  speak  of  alternating  and  successive 
"personalities"  is  a  misnomer,  since,  when  these  phenomena  of  dis- 
eased individuality  are  present,  the  self  is  in  very  unstable  equi- 
librium, and  a  genuine  personality,  in  the  full  sense  of  the  term, 
is  not  in  evidence.  Special  subsystems  or  clusters  of  impulses 
and  feelings  have  the  upper  hand,  and  the  self  is  in  a  state  of 
disintegration. 

It  may  be  maintained  that,  in  such  cases,  the  individual  body 
is  associated,  either  contemporaneously  or  successively,  with 
several  distinct  "souls" ;  and  that,  in  the  case  of  Miss  Beauchamp, 
for  example,  the  struggle  between  B  I,  B  II,  B  III,  and  B  IV 
was  a  contest  for  exclusive  possession  of  this  body  by  the  several 
souls.  This  theory  is  a  modern  restatement  of  the  ancient  doc- 
tor the  Bourne  ease  see  William  James,  Principles  of  Psychology,  Vol.  i, 
Chap.  10.     For  the  Hanna  case  see  Sidis  and  Goodhart,  Multiple  Personality. 


350  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

trine  of  demoniacal  possession.2    Now,  if  this  hypothesis  afforded 
the  most  probable  explanation,  one  would  expect  the  phenomenon 
to  be  more  frequent  with  human  beings  than  as  matter  of  fact  it 
is.     The  hypothesis  does  not  fit  well  the  facts  of  lapse  of  identity 
or  alteration  of  personality.     For  many  of  these  cases,  such  as 
that  of  Ansel  Bourne,  show  a  beclouded,  but  very  evident  con- 
tinuity or  sameness  in  the  so-called  successive  selves.    If  the  souls 
are  really  separate  and  distinct  individualities,  it  is  difficult  to 
understand  why  that  separateness  and  distinctness  of  individu- 
ality which  belongs  to   several   souls   should  comport   with  the 
identity  or  selfsameness  of  the  inhabited  body.     The  great  mass 
of  the  facts  of  psychophysiology  point  to  the  truth  of  the  view 
that  the  body  is  an  important  contributory  factor  in  the  psychical 
life  of  the  individual.    Indeed,  the  terms  "soul"  and  "personality" 
are  used  in  a  very  loose  and  vague  sense  when  applied  to  path- 
ological  cases.      Finally,   the  facts   are   susceptible  of  a   differ- 
ent interpretation;  one  more  in  harmony  with  the  variegated  and 
complex  character  of  our  normal  self-experience,  particularly  with 
the  part  which  is  played  in  normal  life  by  conflicting  feelings 
and  impulses.      These  pathological   cases   of  self-aberration   are 
instances  in  which  the  power  of  personal  synthesis  or  organization 
is  relatively  ineffectual  against  the  disintegrative  power  of  certain 
partial  systems  or  subsystems  of  feelings  and  impulsions,  which 
have  gained  an  abnormal  and  overmastering  intensity  of  expres- 
sion at  the  expense  of  other  factors  in  the  life  of  the  self. 

In  Dr.  Prince's  account  of  the  Beauchamp  case  he  tells  about 
his  hunt  for  the  real  Beauchamp  amidst  the  struggles  of  B  I, 
and  B  IV  and  the  upsetting  interventions  of  the  mischief  making 
"Sally"  (B  II).  He  outlines  the  genesis  of  Sally,  and  shows  how 
she  was  finally  "squeezed  out."  At  first  B  I  the  "saint,  the 
dignified,  patient,  self-repressing  emotional  idealist,"  seemed  to 
be  the  normal  self ;  then,  since  B  IV  the  "woman,"  with  her  vigo- 
rous self-assertion,  seemed  the  healthier  type,  he  concluded  that 
she  must  be  the  normal  self,  and  B  I  must  be  suppressed.  Finally, 
the  "real"  Miss  Beauchamp  was  formed  by  the  synthesis  of  B  I 
and  B  IV  and  the  elimination  of  B  II  (Sally  or  the  "Devil"). 

Now,  in  regard  to  this  very  interesting  case,  it  seems  to  me 
that  Dr.  Prince's  own  account  bears  out  the  view  that  the  normal 

'This  is  the  view  advanced  by  Dr.  William  McDougall  in  his  work  Body 
and  Mind. 


MULTIPLE  PERSONALITY  351 

or  "real"  Miss  Beauchamp  had  never  existed  at  all  before  the 
synthesis  so  skillfully  and  successfully  facilitated  by  his  treatment. 
Miss  Beauchamp  had  probably  never  achieved  a  relatively  stable 
and  well-organized  selfhood  since  adolescence.  Her  life  had  been 
the  theater  of  an  alternating  succession  of  conflicting  impulsions. 
The  details  of  her  early  life  are  very  incomplete  but,  as  given  by 
Dr.  Prince,  they  bear  out  this  view.  The  "Dissociation  of  a  Per- 
sonality" is  the  story  not  of  the  restoration  of  an  older  and  dis- 
integrated personality,  which  was  once  a  harmonious  and  effective 
reality,  but  rather  of  the  organization,  one  might  almost  say  the 
creation,  of  a  personality.  Miss  B.  had  never  been  a  well-integrated 
personality.  Her  case  was  one  of  arrested  development.  Her 
emotional-volitional  condition  was  a  commingling  of  childhood, 
adolescence,  and  maturity.  The  Sally  self  was  notably  that  of 
a  child. 

This  case  is  a  striking  illustration  of  the  principle  that  an 
actual  personality  is  an  organization  of  ideational,  affectional, 
anl  volitional  elements.  Her  alternating  "selves"  were  composed 
of  various  fragmentary  subsystems  of  feelings  and  impulsions, 
which  had  become  so  persistent  and  were  so  in  conflict  with  one 
another  that  they  could  not  readily  be  made  to  form  one  harmo- 
nious system  or  permanent  self.  In  popular  usage  there  may 
be  no  great  harm  in  calling  each  of  these  groups  of  impulsions 
a  self  or  personality;  but  in  psychology  and  philosophy  such  a 
usage  is  very  misleading.  A  true  self  exists  only  when  there  is 
a  coherent  and  conscious  unity  and  continuity  in  the  individual's 
life  and  a  consequent  coherence  and  continuity  in  his  purposes 
and  deeds. 

So-called  alternating  and  conflicting  selves  are  extreme  in- 
stances of  features  that  are  familiar  enough  in  normal  life.  The 
actual  self  is  never  an  entirely  fixed  and  unyielding  system  of 
affections  and  conations.  It  is  more  or  less  fluid  and  plastic.  It 
shows  a  variety  of  aspects,  according  to  the  relations  in  which  it 
operates.  No  one  type  of  attitude,  no  single  line  of  action,  feel- 
ing or  thought,  can  be  said  to  express  the  fullness  of  a  normal 
selfhood.  A  man  shows  different  aspects  of  his  nature  or  person- 
ality in  the  family,  in  business,  in  society,  in  church,  and  at 
play.  Very  frequently  we  are  surprised  when  we  see  the  hard- 
headed  business  man  or  the  sober-minded  scholar  in  his  home  or 
on  an  outing.     We  constantly  find  it  necessary  to  revise  our  esti- 


352  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

mates  of  individual  characters.  We  are  quite  often  surprised  at 
the  suddenly  manifested  power  in  ourselves  of  emotions,  interests, 
and  ideas,  that  we  had  supposed  dead  or  vanished.  There  come 
times  in  the  life  of  every  redblooded  self,  when,  under  the  stress 
of  some  powerful  impulse  or  emotion,  such  as  anger,  fear,  love, 
or  rivalry,  he  is  not  "himself"  even  as  he  had  supposed  himself 
to  be  from  long  and  intimate  acquaintance.  Gusts  of  passion  or 
long-forgotten  cravings  sweep  over  and  sometimes  submerge  the 
humdrum  work-a-day  self. 

I  have  set  down  these  familiar  and  obvious  matters  in  order 
to  enforce  the  principle  that  the  striking  cases  of  disordered  per- 
sonality differ  only  in  degree  and  persistence  from  the  ordinary 
experiences  of  the  normal  self.  The  empirical  self  is  always  a 
more  or  less  unified  complex  of  psychical  impulsions.  The  raw 
materials  of  selfhood  are  specific  impulses,  desires,  emotions,  per- 
cepts, and  images.  Those  always  tend  to  form  some  sort  of  sys- 
tem, whether  permanent  or  temporary.  In  the  cases  of  diseased 
personality  the  controlling  principle  of  rational  synthesis  is  not 
effective  against  the  abnormal  strength  of  some  subsystem  of  im- 
pulses. That  it  is  possible  to  integrate  the  various  elements  of 
the  biological  individual  into  a  coherent  unity  of  purpose,  feeling, 
and  action,  is  evidence  of  the  activity  of  the  principle  of  synthesis 
by  which  the  empirical  personality  is  gradually  being  formed. 
The  most  obvious  and  common  feature  of  these  cases  of  abnormal 
selfhood  is  the  break  in  the  continuity  of  memory,  which  is,  of 
course,  the  basis  of  empirical  or  conscious  self-identity.  The 
conditions  would  seem  to  indicate  a  high  degree  of  nervous  in- 
stability or  disintegration,  symptomatic  of  nerve  fatigue  and  auto- 
intoxication. Explanations  of  such  disintegration  in  terms  of  the 
dissociation  of  neurone  systems  in  the  brain  are  the  most  plausible 
physiological  explanations. 

The  abnormalities  of  personal  life  do  not  disprove  the  func- 
tional activity  in  the  empirical  self  of  that  synthetic  principle 
which  is  the  source  of  our  feeling  of  personal  identity  and  the 
power  which  effects  the  progressive  organization,  into  a  rational 
self,  of  the  variety  of  feelings  and  impulses  which  constitute  the 
crude  materials  of  the  highest  personality. 

There  are  three  distinguishable  phases  of  selfhood:  (1)  The 
empirical  or  actual  self;  this  is  the  concrete  and  variable,  and 
only  partially  organized,  complex  of  impulsions   and  emotions, 


MULTIPLE  PERSONALITY  353 

purposes  and  ideas,  which  make  up  our  everyday  experienced  and 
observed  selfhood.  This  is  the  self  which  others  see,  but  from  a 
different  angle  than  we  see  it  from.  This  self  may  be  further 
analyzed  into  the  social  self,  into  various  social  selves  in  fact — 
the  business  self,  the  bodily  self,  the  religious  self,  and  so  forth. 
Of  course,  these  latter  selves  are  but  partial  aspects  of  the  total 
empirical  self.  (2)  The  formal  self  or  pure  ego.  This  is  the 
active  and  enduring  principle  of  synthesis  which  organizes  the 
empirical  elements  of  selfhood  into  a  unity  and  forms  the  prin- 
ciple of  continuity  on  which  memory  depends.  It  is  consequently 
the  basis  of  the  consciousness  of  personal  identity.  (3)  The  ideal 
self.  This  is  the  self  as  developing  personality;  the  as  yet  but 
imperfectly  realized  integration  of  the  self's  deepest  potencies  and 
interests.  It  is  the  spring  of  new  cognitive,  moral,  aesthetic  and 
religious  valuations.  This  is  the  purposive  and  dynamic  self, 
the  servant  and  creator  of  new  values.  It  is  the  "ideal  self"  which 
plays  such  a  major  role  in  idealistic  metaphysics — in  Kant, 
Fichte,  Hegel,  T.  H.  Green,  Bosanquet,  Bradley  and  Royce.  In- 
asmuch as  the  pure  ego  is  a  mere  formal  abstraction,  and  the 
empirical  ego  is  a  true  personality  only  in  the  degree  in  which 
ideals  are  operative  in  it,  the  ideal  self  is  a  dynamic  entity,  a 
field  of  real  possibilities. 

This  notion  that  the  ideal  self,  the  possible  self,  is  more 
significantly  real  than  the  already  attained  empirical  ego  is  a 
favorite  idea  with  the  great  poets,  as  well  as  with  the  other  great 
spiritual  teachers — with  none  more  so  than  with  Robert  Brown- 
ing.   I  have  space  for  but  one  citation : 

Not  on  the  vulgar  mass 

Called  "work,"  must  sentence  pass, 

Things  done,  that  took  the  eye  and  had  the  price; 

O'er  which,  from  level  stand, 

The  low  world  laid  its  hand, 

Found  straightway  to  its  mind,  could  value  in  a  trice; 

But  all,  the  world's  coarse  thumb 

And  finger  failed  to  plumb, 

So  passed  in  making  up  the  main  account; 

All  instincts  immature, 

All  purposes  unsure, 

That  weighed  not  as  his  work,  yet  swelled  the  man's  amount; 


354  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

Thoughts  hardly  to  be  packed 

Into  a  narrow  act, 

Fancies  that  broke  through  language  and  escaped; 

All  I  could  never  be, 

All,  men  ignored  in  me, 

This,  I  was  worth  to  God,  whose  wheel  the  pitcher  shaped. 

— Rabbi  Ben  Ezra,  23-25. 


CHAPTER  XXVII 


MIND    AND    BODY 


One  of  the  fundamental  problems  in  the  metaphysics  of  per- 
sonality is  the  relation  of  the  individual  mind  to  the  body  which 
it  inhabits.  Is  the  body  simply  an  external  tool  of  the  real  self, 
a  useful  but  not  indispensable  adjunct  and  instrument  of  the 
true  personality  ?  Or,  second,  is  the  body  the  true  reality  of  which 
the  mind  is  a  by-product  ?  Or,  third,  is  the  body  simply  the  phe- 
nomenal expression  of  the  mind,  which  alone  is  truly  existent  ? 
Or,  fourth,  does  the  body  participate  in  and  contribute  to  the 
essential  nature  of  the  self  ?  These  are  the  four  chief  alternatives, 
represented  respectively  by  dualism,  materialism,  spiritualism  or 
mentalism,  and  psychophysical  individualism. 

The  common-sense  theory  of  the  relation  of  mind  and  body 
is  qualitatively  dualistic  and  interactionistic.  Mind  and  body 
are  thought  of  as  two  realities  differing  in  kind,  but  interacting. 
The  mind  is  the  "inside  self"  which  feels,  thinks,  and  strives; 
the  body  is  the  "outside  self"  through  which  the  inner  self  com- 
municates with  the  world  at  large.  Common-sense  thinking  does 
not  offer  any  theory  as  to  how  these  two  diverse  realities  interact. 
It  represents  the  Cartesian  and  Lockian  dualism  become  a  tradi- 
tion. "Common-sense"  always  embodies  ancient  philosophies. 
The  common-sense  view  latently  contains  both  dualistic  and 
monistic  elements.  Animism  or  hylozoism  survives  in  modern 
popular  thinking  on  this  subject. 

I.    Dualism 

Dualism  holds  that  mind  and  body  are  two  disparate  and 
separable  entities.  Each  may  exist  independently  of  the  other. 
There  are  mindless  bodies  and  bodiless  minds.  Dualism  is  based, 
in  the  first  instance,  on  the  patent  contrasts  between  mind  and 
body:  mind  is  not  extended,  cannot  be  divided,  weighed  or  meas- 

355 


356  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

ured  by  physical  means,  knows  itself ;  that  is,  it  is  a  self -related, 
self-conscious,  immaterial  unity;  body  is  extended  in  space,  can 
be  weighed,  measured,  and  divided;  is  not  a  unity  for  itself  but 
only  for  another,  that  is,  for  a  mind.  Descartes  neatly  summed 
up  the  contrast  when  he  said,  "the  essence  of  mind  is  thought, 
the  essence  of  body  is  extension."  It  is  noteworthy  that  Spinoza 
based  his  doctrine  of  parallelism  on  the  dualistic  theory  of  Des- 
cartes, conceived  as  rendering  unintelligible  and  impossible  the 
interaction  of  mind  and  body.  The  parallelistic  theory  has  been 
strengthened  by  the  modern  doctrine  of  the  absolutely  closed  and 
self-sufficient  character  of  the  physical  series  of  causes  and  effects 
considered  as  energy-content.  Every  occurrence  in  nature  is  to 
be  explained  in  terms  of  the  mechanical  equivalence  of  causes  and 
effects.  Nothing  but  precisely  calculable  factors  can  be  admitted 
into  the  sequences  of  physical  events.  The  physiological  activi- 
ties of  the  human  organism  are  to  be  explained  in  the  same  way 
as  other  physical  processes.  When  I  move  my  arm  to  write  this 
sentence  the  entire  movement  and  its  resultants  are  just  parts  of 
a  mechanical  series  of  transformations  of  physical  energy.  My 
body  is  a  peculiarly  complicated  piece  of  physical  mechanism.  In 
it  outgo  and  intake  of  energy  must  be  exactly  equivalent,  and 
when  outgo  begins  to  increase  cumulatively  over  intake  the  pro- 
cess of  decay  and  death  is  already  setting  in.  There  is  thus  no 
place  in  the  sequence  of  transformations  of  physical  energies  for 
the  influence  of  mind. 

The  absolutely  closed  and  self-complete  character  of  the  me- 
chanical sequence  of  causes  and  effects  in  the  human  organism 
is  held  to  be  a  corollary  of  the  principle  of  the  conservation 
of  energy.  Now,  as  a  working  method  in  physical  science, 
this  principle  means  only  that,  within  the  limits  of  any  finite 
closed  material  system,  the  energy  content  or  sum  total  of 
energy  remains  constant  through  all  the  qualitative  transforma- 
tions of  energy  that  may  take  place  within  the  closed  system. 
The  mechanistic  conception  of  the  organism,  while  undoubtedly 
a  most  valuable  methodological  standpoint  in  the  investigation  of 
vital  processes,  has  not  been  fully  established  as  the  whole  story 
about  life.  But  even  though  it  were  established,  it  would  not 
follow  that  the  physical  systems  which  constitute  human  bodies 
are  absolutely  closed  mechanical  systems,  or  that  they  have  no 
other  meaning  than  that  which  belongs  to  parts  of  a  world  mechan- 


MIND  AND  BODY  357 

ism.  If  the  body  is  a  machine,  it  does  not  follow  that  the  mind 
may  not  direct  the  machine.  The  validity  of  the  principle  of  the 
conservation  of  energy  within  the  limits  of  conventionally  closed 
physical  systems  of  energy,  that  is,  of  such  systems  considered  in 
abstraction  from  minds,  is  not  a  sufficient  warrant  for  extending 
the  application  of  this  principle  to  the  concrete  totality  of  the 
real  universe,  which  includes  minds  and  their  operations.  The 
physicist  abstracts  from  the  concrete  world  the  activities  of  minds, 
and  makes  the  remainder  the  sole  object  of  his  investigations. 

The  same  amount  of  energy,  measured  in  terms  of  physical 
units,  may  have  very  different  psychical  values.  The  same 
amount  of  energy,  for  example,  that  goes  into  the  writing  of  this 
chapter  would,  if  expended  in  the  fall  of  a  brick  on  my  head, 
have,  I  fondly  believe,  a  very  diminished  result  in  terms  of  human 
value.  The  characteristic  culture-feature  of  applied  science,  in- 
dustry, and  the  fine  arts,  is  that  in  these  activities  the  human 
mind  does  direct  the  course  of  physical  energy  to  realize  enhanced 
psychical  values,  hedonic,  ethical,  aesthetic,  etc.  This  power  of 
guidance  is  the  source  of  the  technical  progress  that  makes  civi- 
lization possible.  It  is  in  its  power  to  direct  physical  energies 
into  channels  that  sustain  the  fruition  of  human  values,  that  the 
mind's  creative  capacity  is  seen.  This  constitutes  mind's  unique- 
ness in  the  order  of  nature.  The  conservation  of  physical  energy 
may  be  the  fundamental  condition  of  its  direction  and  application 
by  mind. 

It  may  be  objected  that  this  directivity,  by  which  psychical 
values  are  created  and  conserved,  means  the  application  of  energy ; 
that  this  energy  of  direction  must  either  be  drawn  from  the 
constant  sum  of  physical  energy  in  the  natural  order,  or  be  an 
injection  ab  extra  of  energy  by  the  mind  into  the  physical  system; 
and  that  the  latter  hypothesis  is  both  inconceivable  and  contra- 
dictory to  the  principle  of  the  conservation  of  energy,  while  the 
former  hypothesis  simply  makes  the  mind  an  incalculable  con- 
centration of  physical  energy.  If  mind  be  not  a  form  of  physical 
energy  then  it  cannot  influence  the  course  of  physical  energy.  It 
takes  energy  to  alter  the  direction  of  energy.  The  question  of 
the  conceivability  or  imaginability  of  the  influence  of  mind  on 
body  I  shall  discuss  later.  As  to  the  question  of  fact,  I  hold  that 
there  is  no  fact  which  has  better  empirical  attestation  than  the 
reciprocal  influence  of  mind  and  body.     In  health  and  disease,  in 


358  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

action  and  repose,  the  fact  is  abundantly  and  continuously  ex- 
perienced. The  scientist  or  philosopher  who  denies  the  fact,  in 
the  interest  of  a  theory,  is  so  wedded  to  his  own  prejudices  dressed 
up  as  a  priori  conceptions  that  he  is  blind  to  the  plain  facts  of 
human  experience.  To  say  that  mental  guidance  of  bodily  en- 
ergies contradicts  the  law  of  the  conservation  of  energy  is  to  beg 
the  whole  question ;  it  is  to  assume  offhand  that  the  ultimate 
system  of  things  in  its  totality  is  a  closed  mechanical  system.  It 
is  to  assume  that  the  physical  universe  is  a  self-existent  whole, 
and  that  every  so-called  psychophysical  organism  is  nothing  but 
a  finite  physical  machine  within  the  absolute  or  world  machine. 

It  is  in  accordance  with  the  apparent  facts  to  say  that  the 
mind  is  not  a  form  of  physical  energy;  but  that  it  is  a  unique 
kind  of  activity,  which  can  direct  physical  energies  without  add- 
ing to  or  subtracting  from  the  quantities  of  these.  The  human 
values  of  the  natural  process  which  are  extracted,  or  created,  if 
you  like  the  term  better,  by  mind  are  not  measurable  by  physical 
standards.  Therefore,  their  appearance,  maintenance  and  aug- 
mentation need  make  no  difference  at  all  in  the  calculable  rela- 
tions of  physical  processes.  But  the  appearance,  maintenance, 
and  augmentation  of  these  psychical  values  makes  all  the  differ- 
ence in  the  world  in  the  humanistic  meanings  of  the  sum  of 
things.  The  real  world  is  one  in  which  the  laws  of  behavior  of 
physical  things  are,  in  part,  at  least,  subservient  to  the  realization 
of  psychical  values.  Any  world  concept  short  of  this  is  incom- 
plete and  inadequate. 

But  is  it  not  inconceivable  that  an  unextended,  imponderable, 
immeasurable  entity  should  be  able  to  influence  a  system  of  ex- 
tended, ponderable,  and  measurable  particles,  and  vice  versa? 
If  by  "inconceivability"  be  meant  that  we  cannot  form  a  satis- 
factory picture  or  image  of  the  process  in  question  that  is  true 
but  inconclusive.  One  cannot  form  an  adequate  picture  of  how 
a  living  embryo  carries  in  itself  the  predetermination  of  the 
structures  and  functions  of  a  developed  organism!  One  cannot 
form  an  adequate  picture  of  how  gravitational  attraction  acts,  or 
of  how  radioactive  matter  goes  through  all  its  transformations,  or 
even  of  how  one  atom  or  electron  acts  on  another !  Our  scientific 
theories  and  explanations  consist,  to  a  very  large  extent,  in  the 
interpolation  of  crude  and  inadequate  pictures  or  images,  to  ac- 
count for  the  intermediate  or  imperceptible  steps  in  processes 


MIND  AND  BODY  359 

which,  taken  in  the  rough  or  as  wholes,  are  unquestionable  and 
familiar.  Our  scientific,  no  less  than  our  popular,  thinking  is 
dominated  by  spatial  metaphors. 

II.     Psychophysical  Parallelism 

The  difficulty  of  imagining  in  detail  how  mind  and  body  can 
interact,  together  with  the  assumption  of  the  closed  and  self- 
sufficient  character  of  the  physical  series  or  sequences  of  causes 
and  effects,  have  led  to  the  revival  and  extension  of  the  theory  of 
psychophysical  parallelism,  which  was  first  enunciated  by  Spinoza. 
This  theory  is  based  on  an  extreme  ontological  dualism  or  quali- 
tative opposition  of  mind  and  body.  It  seemed  a  simple  and 
consistent  way  out  of  the  difficulties  of  Cartesian  dualism.  And, 
in  its  revised  and  extended  forms  to-day,  it  seems  to  square  with 
the  doctrine  of  the  conservation  of  energy;  and  to  fit  in,  as  no 
other  theory  does,  with  the  facts  and  theories  of  neural  physiology 
and  psychophysics. 

As  it  has  been  formulated  in  recent  times  the  theory  of  psycho- 
physical parallelism  has  confused  two,  and  sometimes  three,  very 
different  conceptions.  It  may  be  taken  in  the  restricted  sense 
of  psychoneural  parallelism,  the  wider  sense  of  psychophysiolog- 
ical parallelism,  or  in  the  widest  sense  of  complete  psychophysical 
parallelism.  When  the  psychologist  says  that  to  every  mental 
^process  there  corresponds  a  nerve  process  ("no  psychosis  without 
neurosis"),  he  is  employing  the  conception  of  psychoneural  paral- 
lelism. It  is  perhaps  true  that  no  mental  processes  do  take  place 
without  corresponding  nerve  processes  of  some  sort.  The  evidence 
for  this  assumption  is  very  strong,  certainly  strong  enough  to 
make  it  a  good  working  hypothesis  in  psychology.  But  a  general 
correspondence  of  conscious  processes  with  certain  complex  neural 
processes  does  not  necessarily  exclude  interdependence.  And 
there  is  no  conclusive  evidence  that  a  mental  process  corresponds 
to  every  nerve  process.  Indeed,  very  little  is  known  about  the 
character  of  the  elementary  nerve  processes.  If  recognitive  mem- 
ory and  the  selective  utilization  of  previous  experiences  to  effect 
novel  combinations  are  signs  of  the  presence  of  mind,  then  there 
are  many  indications  that  a  great  part  of  neural  activity  is  un- 
accompanied by  conscious  mental  processes.  In  man,  and  still 
more  in  animals,  a  large  part  of  the  physiological  activities  are 


360  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

carried  on  without  any  accompanying  consciousness.  Elaborate 
activities  of  metabolism,  circulation,  growth  and  decay  take  place 
without  any  awareness  thereof. 

The  mind  seems  to  function  in  dependence  on  the  central 
nervous  system.     In  the  ascending  scale  of  complexity  of  animal 
organization,  there  is  a  correspondence  between  the  degree   of 
organization  of  the  nervous  system  and  its  mass  relatively  to  the 
mass  of  the  entire  organism,  and  the  degree  of  mental  activity. 
The  more  complex  and  highly  integrated  the  central  nervous  sys- 
tem the  richer  and  more  unified  and  continuous  the  activity  of 
consciousness.     The  facts  of  comparative  physiology  and  compar- 
ative psychology  point  to  a  specific  integration  of  the  nervous 
system  as  the  condition  for  the  functioning  of  mind  in  its  per- 
ceptual and  volitional  relations  to  the  physical  world.     The  evi- 
dence is  thus  very  strong  for  a  limited  psychoneural  correspond- 
ence.    But  this  correspondence  cannot  be  carried  out  in  minute 
detail.    It  is  not  a  perfect  parallelism.    It  is  at  present  supposed 
that  the  neurone  is  the  unit  of  nervous  structure  and  activity,  but 
this  theory  may  be  supplanted  at  any  moment  by  another.    There 
seems  to  be  an  integration  of  elemental  nerve  processes  in  the  cen- 
tral nervous  system.     But,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  current  theories 
as  to  the  elementary  neural  activities  and  their  modes  of  integra- 
tion are  based  on  a   supposed   analogy  between  them   and  the 
processes  of  consciousness.    Inasmuch  as  more  is  known  in  regard 
to  the  character  of  conscious  processes  than  of  cortical  processes, 
there  is  no  warrant  for  making  speculative  analogies  the  basis 
for  a  theory  of  psychoneural  parallelism  which  is  not  in  accord 
with  the  empirical  nature  of  consciousness  itself.     The  fact  that 
j  nerve  activity  must  reach  a  specific  degree  of  complication  and 
i  integration  before  such  a  conscious  process  as  perception  ensues 
'  is   a  strong   argument  against  a   complete   psychoneural  paral- 
j  lelism.1 

Mental  elements,  such  as  sensations,  feeling-impulses,  per- 
cepts, and  memory  images,  do  not  really  exist  apart  from  the  in- 
tegrated mind  or  empirical  unity  of  consciousness,  which  we 
analyze  into  these  artefacts.  And  there  appears  to  be  nothing 
in  the  shape  of  an  elementary  nerve  process  that  can  be  regarded 


1  The  facts  in  this  connection  are  formulated  in  the  psychophysical  law  or 
Weber- Wechner  law  of  the  relation  of  stimulus  to  sensation.  See  Titchener, 
Experimental  Psychology,  Vol.  II,  Introduction,  etc. 


MIND  AND  BODY  361 

as  strictly  parallel  to  the  activity  of  attentive  self-consciousness. 
Precisely  the  most  significant  feature  of  mental  series  is  its  re- 
flective or  double  character.  We  have  not  only  mental  series  but 
awareness  thereof  as  a  series,  not  only  consciousness  but  self- 
consciousness.  Let  us  assume,  for  the  purposes  of  illustration, 
that,  by  the  use  of  a  hyper-microscope  and  a  series  of  mirrors,2 
a  man  might  perceive  his  own  brain  states  and  imagine  him  per- 
ceiving the  brain  state  parallel  to  his  perception  of  his  own  brain 
state.  Then  parallelism  lands  one  in  the  absurdity  of  an  infinite 
series  in  which  perception  forever  chases  in  vain  its  partner  brain 
state.  My  awareness  of  the  perception  of  my  own  brain  state, 
as  parallel  to  the  state  of  consciousness  which  perceives  it,  would 
involve,  in  the  instant  of  the  perception  of  the  parallel  brain  state, 
another  brain  state  parallel  to  the  perception  of  the  parallelism 
between  my  previous  brain  state  and  the  brain  state  itself.  Hence, 
if  parallelism  were  literally  true  there  could  be  no  such  thing  under 
any  conditions  as  a  perception  of  parallelism,  and  self-conscious- 
ness and  continuous  memory  would  be  inconceivable. 

There  is  a  general  correspondence  between  the  integration  of 
the  central  nervous  system  and  the  unity  of  the  mind.  "The  inte- 
grating power  of  the  nervous  system  has  in  fact  in  the  higher  ani- 
mals, more  than  in  the  lower,  constructed  from  a  mere  collection  of 
organs  and  segments,  a  functional  unity,  an  individual  of  more 
perfected  solidarity."  3  This  functional  unity  corresponds  with 
the  psychic  unity.  From  the  biological  standpoint,  the  cerebrum 
may  be  regarded  as  the  ganglion  of  the  distance-receptors,  and 
consciousness  as  an  adjunct  to  the  centers  which  exercise  control 
over  reflexes.  Consciousness  is  a  center  of  indetermination  which 
intervenes  in  reflex  activities  to  enable  the  organism  to  adjust 
itself  to  the  environment,  by  reactions  involving  factors  of  greatly 
increased  range  in  space  and  time.  In  the  technical  language  of 
the  physiologist,  consciousness  controls  the  coordination  of  "dis- 
tance receptors"  and  "consummatory  reactions."  The  cerebrum 
is  the  immediate  instrument  of  this  control  and  hence  the  imme- 
diate basis  of  consciousness.  But  this  control  function  of  con- 
sciousness makes  it  a  difficult  and  artificial  theory,  even  from  a 


2  This  illustration  was  suggested  to  me  by  a  similar  one  employed  from  a 

different  standpoint  by  Professor  C.  A.  Strong  in  Why  the  Mind  Has  a  Body. 

*C.  S.  Sherrington,  The  Integrative  Action  of  the  Nervous  System,  p.  353. 


362  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

purely  biological  standpoint,  to  regard  the  processes  of  mind  as 
inert  concomitants  of  cerebral  functions,  as  a  series  of  episodical 
and  mysterious  illuminations  which,  accompanying  cerebral  activi- 
ties, yet  neither  affect  these  in  any  way  nor  are  affected  by  them. 
From  the  standpoint  of  a  strict  psychoneural  parallelism  mind 
or  consciousness  is  both  otiose  and  inexplicable. 

Psychophysiological  parallelism  would  mean  that  to  every  sort 
of  physiological  functioning  there  is  a  corresponding  mental 
process.  The  arguments  which  tell  against  a  literal  and  detailed 
psychoneural  parallelism  tell  with  even  greater  force  against  this 
form.  If  mental  functioning  be  conditioned  by  a  central  nervous 
system  it  follows  that  there  can  be  no  mind  where  there  is  not  even 
a  rudimentary  nervous  system.  Of  course  it  is  possible  that  proto- 
zoans and  even  plants  have  minds.  They  do  not  seem  to  show 
clear  signs  of  true  memory  or  of  conscious  adaptation.  They  may 
possess  evanescent  sentience  like  the  body  monads  of  Leibniz. 
Possibly  intelligence  or  mind  is  coextensive  with  life.  Possibly 
the  vital  principle  is  identical  with  the  psychical  principle;  I  do 
not  see  how  one  can  come  to  a  definite  conclusion  on  this  point. 
The  mind  may  be  the  more  clearly  conscious  and  highly  organized 
form  of  the  rudimentary  intelligence  which  is  the  organizing 
principle  of  life ;  or  it  may  be  a  qualitatively  different  entity.  I 
incline  to  the  latter  view. 

The  third  form  of  parallelism,  psychophysical  parallelism,  in 
the  strict  sense,  is  hylopsychism  or  panpsychism — all  matter  is 
"besouled."  It  would  require  the  assumption  of  atoms  of  mind- 
stuff,  corresponding  with  the  ultimate  units  of  matter  or  energy. 
It,  and  indeed  all  forms  of  strict  parallelism,  imply  that  the  more 
complex  and  higher  forms  of  mind  are  made  by  the  aggregation 
or  compounding  of  discrete  mental  particles;  and  the  principles 
of  aggregation,  in  the  last  analysis,  are  conceived  on  the  analogy 
of  the  arrangement  of  mass  particles  in  spatial  configurations. 
But  the  unity  of  a  mind  and  its  continuity  are  of  a  different  order 
from  any  series  of  merely  physical  configurations.  A  mind  is  not 
a  mosaic  of  atoms  of  mind-stuff.  Indeed  parallelism  is  only  a  trans- 
itional hypothesis.  When  thought  out  it  lands  in  either — (a.) 
materialism  or  epiphenomenalism ;  or  (&)  Berkeleyan  idealism, 
spiritualism  or  mentalism  (the  doctrine  that  only  minds  are  real)  ; 
or  (c)  agnostic  monism,  the  doctrine  of  the  unknown  third; 
namely,  that  the  physical  and  mental  in  series  are  diverse  mani- 


MIND  AND  BODY  363 

festations  of  one  unknown  reality,  which  is  neither  the  sum  of 
mind  and  body  nor  identical  with  the  character  of  either  when 
taken  by  itself. 

(a)  Materialism  regards  mind  as  a  product  of  physiological 
activities — an  epiphenomenon  or  reflection  thrown  up  by  certain 
highly  complicated  forms  of  physicochemical  process.  Material- 
ism does  not  square  with  the  plain  facts  of  experience,  and  it  con- 
flicts with  fundamental  principles  of  the  theory  of  knowledge. 
As  we  have  before  argued,  it  is  just  as  onesided  an  error  to  affirm 
the  independent  existence  of  a  physical  world  out  of  all  relation 
to  experience  and  experiencers,  but  which  causes  these  to  exist,  as 
it  is  to  affirm  the  existence  of  minds  out  of  all  relation  to  a  physical 
world.  We  can  know  nothing  of  the  existence  or  nature  of  a  world 
supposed  to  be  out  of  all  relation  to  percipients.  The  real  objects 
of  our  physical  experience  consist  of  the  socially  accessible  or 
public  realm  of  perceptions,  actual  and  possible.  The  real  physical 
world  is  not  the  system  of  scientific  symbols  devised  by  the  scien- 
tific imagination  to  facilitate  more  exact  description  and  calcula- 
tion of  certain  highly  general  aspects  of  the  perceived  physical 
order.  The  primary  reality  of  the  world  is  not  to  be  found  in 
atoms,  electrons,  and  ether,  but  in  the  system  of  actual  and  possible 
public  experience.  In  this  system  there  are  two  constant  factors 
— neither  of  which  is  reducible  to  the  other — the  percipients  for 
whose  perceiving  and  relating  activities  the  world  exists  as  a  public 
realm,  and  the  perceived  and  understood  qualities  of  this  world. 
The  real  world  is  a  system  of  experiences  in  relation,  which  in- 
volves and  includes  experiencers.  The  world- whole  is  an  organized 
totality  of  objects  of  awTareness  and  centers  of  awareness. 

Let  it  be  admitted,  as  a  plausible  hypothesis,  that  the  invari- 
able condition  of  conscious  functioning  is  a  specific  complex  of 
physicochemical  activities.  Let  it  be  further  admitted  that  spe- 
cific variations  in  the  processes  of  consciousness  may  be  invariably 
conditioned  by  specific  chemical  differences.  Let  it  be  admitted 
that,  if  our  knowledge  were  only  complete  enough,  the  physical 
differences  between  Shakespeare  and  the  grave-digger  in  Hamlet 
would  be  found  to  be  strictly  correlated  with  the  mental  differ- 
ences. It  does  not  follow  that  physicochemical  forces  are  the  sole 
and  ultimate  reality,  and  that  they  suffice  to  explain  mind.  To 
assert  such  a  consequence  would  be  to  ignore  the  psychical  and 
spiritual  values  which,  as  data  of  immediate  experience,  are  asso- 


364  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

ciated  with  these  specific  physical  differences.  The  physico- 
chemical  conditions  of  conscious  and  rational  activity  are  unique 
conditions,  just  because  of  this  association.  The  logic  of  the 
argument,  which  would  ignore  the  psychical  values  associated  with 
certain  specific  physical  activities,  is  just  as  bad  logic  as  that  which 
would  deny  that  psychical  processes  are  conditioned  by  certain 
physical  processes.  The  former  are  conditioned  by  the  latter,  but 
there  is  no  good  evidence  that  they  are  caused  by  these  alone.  The 
adequate  view  is  one  that  takes  experience  in  its  organic,  or  rather 
superorganic,  totality.  The  key  to  the  interpretation  of  experience 
as  a  whole  lies  just  in  the  definite  actualities  of  intelligent  appre- 
hension and  control  of  physical  energies  for  the  production  and 
maintenance  of  human  values ;  this  key  is  found  and  used  in  the 
harvest  of  beauty,  order,  social  progress  and  individual  self-fulfill- 
ment through  science,  morals,  art  and  personal  relations  which 
human  cultural  activity  yields.  The  intellectual,  moral  and 
aesthetic  values,  distilled  from  nature  by  mind,  are  indubitable 
facts  of  experience.  A  world  which  can  and  does  yield  these  values 
is  much  more  than  a  merely  material  system.  The  so-called 
opposition  between  facts  and  values  is  really  a  conflict  between 
special  spheres  of  values;  for  example,  between  the  values  of  a 
mechanico-causal  explanation  and  those  of  a  humanistic  interpre- 
tation of  nature.  But  these  conflicts  are  internal  to  the  whole 
realm  of  factual-worthful  experience.  All  fact  has  value  of  some 
sort,  and  all  values  must  belong  to  the  total  world  of  fact. 

Selves  are  implicated  in  the  physical  order.  Eut  just  as  truly 
is  the  physical  order  implicated  in  the  lives  of  selves.  It  would 
not  be  misleading  to  say  that  selves  are  the  offspring  of  the  physical 
order,  provided  this  statement  be  supplemented  by  the  converse 
one  that  the  whole  meaning  of  the  physical  order  and  of  knowledge 
thereof  includes,  as  its  most  significant  feature,  the  formation  and 
fruition  of  psychical  individuality.  The  increasing  adequacy  of 
our  knowledge  of  nature  is  the  increasing  insight  into  the  rich  and 
vast  individuality  of  a  universe  which  at  its  upper  level  is  a 
systematic  and  living  whole  of  finite  and  progressing  individuals. 
Man,  as  intelligent,  self-directing  individuality,  is  truly  the  micro- 
cosm. An  individual  is  a  maximum  unity  of  diverse  and  comple- 
mentary qualities  or  powers.  The  world  is  a  psychophysical 
organization ;  and  the  destiny  of  man,  as  a  psychophysical  indi- 
vidual, is  by  knowledge  and  action  consciously  to  unite  himself 


MIND  AND  BODY  365 

with  the  world,  and  in  so  doing,  at  once  to  reflect  the  cosmos  in  his 
own  being  and  to  expand  and  harmonize  that  being.  Selves  are 
centers  in  which  the  meaning  of  the  whole  process  of  nature 
becomes  consciously  concentrated.  The  total  process  of  nature 
thus  wins  a  multitudinous  awareness  and  enhancement.  Its  sig- 
nificance is  revealed  and  enriched  by  its  multiplication  in  new 
individuated  centers  of  value.  The  world  of  selves  is  a  world  of 
psychophysical  individualities,  in  which  one  can  read  the  prevail- 
ing tendency  and  meaning  of  nature. 

(6)  A  second  way  of  escape  from  dualistic  parallelism  is 
offered  by  that  form  of  spiritualism  or  idealism  so  persuasively 
expounded  by  Berkeley.  I  prefer  to  call  this  doctrine  "mental- 
ism"  or  "idealism,"  since  it  assumes  that  only  mental  processes 
are  real.  I  shall  not  enter  here  into  an  extended  critique  of  men- 
talism.  In  Book  I,  I  have  already  discussed  some  of  its  weaknesses. 
The  following  is  a  summary  of  objections  to  it:  (1)  If  all  bodies 
are  only  the  effects  of  the  direct  action  of  the  Divine  Spirit  on 
finite  spirits,  on  what  grounds  can  one  account  for  the  peculiar 
warmth  and  intimacy  of  the  feel  of  his  own  body  in  contrast  with 
all  other  bodies?  (2)  What  is  the  relation  between  my  spirit  or 
yours  and  the  Divine  Spirit  ?  Are  we  but  thoughts  in  the  Divine 
Mind?  (3)  "Whence  arises  the  contrast  between  my  mind  and 
my  body  and  between  my  mind  and  all  other  bodies,  if  all  bodies 
are  but  impressions  made  on  my  mind  by  the  Divine  Mind  ?  (4) 
If  bodies  have  no  sort  of  independent  existence  why  should  it  be 
necessary  for  me  to  infer  your  mental  existence  and  behavior  from 
a  group  of  sense  qualities  impressed  on  my  mind  by  God,  but 
which,  nevertheless,  are  in  many  cases  very  equivocal  in  the  clews 
that  they  give  me  to  your  mental  attitudes?  (5)  What  is  the 
relation  between  your  body  as  it  exists  for  you  and  as  it  exists  for 
me  ?  It  cannot  be  the  same  body,  since  for  you  it  is  the  sensory 
complex  caused  in  your  mind  by  God  and  for  me  the  quite  dif- 
ferent sensory  complex  caused  by  God  in  my  mind  ?  In  brief, 
Berkeleyan  idealism  raises  more  difficulties  than  it  solves. 

(c)  The  third  ontological  hypothesis,  agnostic  monism,  which 
asserts  that  mind  and  body  are  the  double  aspects  under  which  the 
unknown  substance  of  things  is  manifested,  fails  to  explain  in  any 
fashion  the  concrete  relations  of  mind  and  body.  To  say  that  mind 
and  body  are  parallel  manifestations  of  an  unknown  third  some- 
thing is  to  take  refuge  in  a  mystery  and  an  abstraction.     It  is 


.366  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

simply  to  re-assert  that  mind  and  body  are  parallel  and  that  the 
parallelism  is  the  expression  of  something — we  know  not  what. 

III.    Psychophysical  Individualism: 

The  element  of  truth  which  is  expressed  badly  in  the  "double 
aspect"  or  "unknown  third"  doctrine  of  mind  and  body  is  the 
correlativity  or  functional  interdependence  of  mind  and  body.    A 
mind  is  a  different  and  higher  kind  of  unity  than  a  body,  never- 
theless there  is  a  functional  interdependence  between  them.    What- 
ever physiological  complex  be  the  indispensable  basis  of  mental 
functioning,  in  our  empirical  order,  whether  it  be  a  neurone  sys- 
tem or,  in  the  case  of  more  rudimentary  minds,  a  simpler  system, 
the  mind  and  its  bodily  basis,  although  distinct,  are  inseparable. 
There  are  no  empirical  grounds,  barring  for  the  present  the  con- 
sideration of  spiritistic  phenomena,  which  give  us  the  least  inkling 
as  to  how  a  mind  may  function  apart  from  a  body.     On  the  other 
hand  a  physiological  system  which   is  functionally  coordinated 
with  a  mind  is  ipso  facto  different  in  character  and  results  from 
one  which   is  not  thus  coordinated.      Whatsoever  physiological 
system  may  be  immediately  organic  to  a  mental  self  is  qualified 
by  that  organicity.    Therefore,  it  is  quite  as  incorrect  to  say  that 
the  sole  causes  of  mental  activity  are  to  be  found  in  the  chemical 
processes  of  the  body,  as  it  is  to  say  that  the  mind  can  function 
without  a  body  at  all.     The  actual  self  is  a  psychophysical  indi- 
vidual, in  which  mental  action  is  conditioned  by,  and  conditions, 
bodily  action.     Some  bodily  processes  seem  to  give  rise  solely  to 
other  bodily  processes ;  but  some  bodily  processes  plus  mental 
processes  give  rise  to  other  mental  processes  plus  further  bodily 
processes.     An  organism  and  a  mind,  which  is  functionally  co- 
ordinate with  it,  together  constitute  a  specific  or  unique  kind  of 
machine  which  I  call  a  psychophysical  individual.    The  interaction 
of  mind  and  body  cannot  be  of  the  simple  type  of  mechanico-causal 
interaction.    There  are  no  measurable  constants  or  units  of  mental 
energy;  there  are  no  mechanical  equivalents  for  thoughts,  pur- 
poses, and  ideals.    Hence,  the  interaction  of  mind  and  body  must 
be  that  of  reciprocating  factors  in  a  single  system — an  individu- 
ality.   We  have  seen  that  in  organisms  the  sum  total  of  their  vital 
processes  seem  to  be  the  expression  of  what  I  have  called  the 
principle  of  organic  individuation,  the  vital  principle.     Whether 


MIND  AND  BODY  367 

the  latter  principle  is  to  be  identified  with  the  individuality  of 
mind  I  do  not  know.  Certainly  the  most  concrete,  rich  and  unified 
type  of  individuality,  of  which  we  have  experience,  is  the  human 
individual  which  is  psychophysical.  In  fact,  all  our  concepts  of 
individuality,  and  their  application  to  lower,  and  conceivably  to 
higher,  individuals  than  man,  are  based  on  either  observed  or 
imagined  analogies  between  the  objects  to  which  these  concepts  are 
applied  and  human  individuality.  The  reflective  analysis  and  the 
synthetic  extension  of  self-intuition  by  the  human  individual  is  the 
basis  of  all  our  applications  of  the  concept  of  the  individual, 
whether  it  be  to  electrons,  atoms,  molecules,  organisms  or  to  super- 
men, angels  and  God. 

The  individuation  of  the  bodily  organism  is  the  basis  for  the 
progressive  realization  of  the  mind's  identity-in-difference  or  indi- 
vidual unity.  Whether  or  not  there  be  organisms  devoid  of  senti- 
ent souls,  the  unity  of  the  organism  represents,  in  its  successive 
ascents  towards  more  complex  individuality,  the  instrumentality 
by  which  the  mind  finds  itself  in  commerce  with  the  world  in  its 
work  of  self-organization.  Teleological  interdependence  does  not 
simply  supervene  upon  mechanism.  The  latter  is  everywhere 
present  and  subordinate  to  the  realization  of  psychical  values. 
This  is  what  I  mean  by  teleology — that,  as  a  matter  of  fact  and 
principle,  reality  is  a  living  system  in  which  values  are  constantly 
being  produced  and  conserved.  In  the  functional  unity  of  mind 
and  body  we  find  an  empirical  example  of  individual  teleological 
system. 

The  real  personality  is  not  identical  with  the  body,  nor  even 
with  the  central  nervous  system.  But  the  personality  is  dependent, 
for  the  sensory  materials  of  its  inner  life,  and  for  its  modes  of 
interaction  with  the  external  or  physical  order,  upon  the  function- 
ing of  the  nervous  system.  Probably  the  nervous  system  and  the 
whole  body  are  but  highly  complicated  physicochemical  systems 
for  the  transformation  of  the  more  general  forms  of  physical 
energy  into  physiological  energy. 

The  mind  is  not  a  physical  substance,  but  it  is  conditioned  in 
its  operations  by  its  association  with  a  physical  complex.  Mind 
is  not  extended  in  space  in  the  mathematical  sense,  but  it  is  local- 
ized in  and  holds  transactions  with  the  world  through  a  spatial 
complex.  The  deepest  source  of  the  difficulty  in  accepting  psycho- 
physical interaction  lies,  as  has  been  effectively  shown  by  Bergson 


368  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

in  his  brilliant  work  Matiere  et  Memoire,  in  the  artificial  and 
overdrawn  contrast  between  body  as  extended  in  space  and  mind 
as  unextended,  which  found  its  first  clear  statement  in  the 
Cartesian  philosophy,  but  which  has  its  roots  deep  in  man's 
practical  need  of  isolating  and  analyzing  matter  in  order  to  act 
upon  it.  But  actual  bodies  are  not  purely  homogeneous  spatial 
magnitudes.  They  are  heterogeneous  or  qualitatively  diverse 
dynamic  complexes.  They  have  finite  extensity  and  finite  divisi- 
bility. They  are  specific  individuals  or  clusters  of  energy-centers. 
Pure  homogeneous  geometrical  extension  is  an  intellectual  abstrac- 
tion from  the  concrete  space  world.  Actual  bodies  are  concrete 
extensities.  They  are  localized  dynamic  systems  of  action  and 
reaction  in  the  total  system  of  forces  which  constitutes  the  physical 
world. 

Physics  is  gradually  establishing,  on  surer  foundations,  the 
view  that  mass  and  spatial  magnitude  are  phenomena  of  centers  of 
activity.  Physical  reality  is  a  vast  system  of  motions  going  on  at 
an  indefinite  variety  of  rates,  and  these  motions  are  the  expres- 
sions of  the  dynamic  interrelations  of  centers  of  activity.  Whether 
or  not  all  energy,  mass  and  inertia  can  be  stated  in  terms  of  elec- 
tron charges,  certainly  the  triumph  of  the  atomic  theory  of 
electricity  has  brought  increasing  evidence  for  the  dynamic  theory 
of  matter.  Inertia  or  impenetrability  is  the  most  fundamental 
property  of  matter.  The  inertia  of  an  electrically  charged  cor- 
I  puscle  appears  to  be  due  to  its  motion  in  an  electromagnetic  field, 
and  this  suggests  strongly  the  theory  that  the  whole  of  the  inertia 
or  mass  of  bodies  may  be  due  to  electricity.  "We  regard  the  atom 
as  built  up  of  units  of  negative  electricity  and  an  equal  number 
of  units  of  positive  electricity."  "Mass  changes  with  electric 
charge,  for  example,  when  a  single  particle  moves  in  a  magnetic 
field  the  mass  in  the  region  round  about  changes.  Tubes  of  force 
carry  ether  and  ether  has  mass.  The  electric  particle,  when  it 
moves,  carries  along  with  it  its  lines  of  force  which  grip  the  ether 
and  carry  some  of  it  along.  When  an  electric  particle  is  moved 
the  mass  of  ether  has  to  be  moved  and  the  apparent  mass  of  the 
particle  is  increased.  The  mass  of  the  electrical  particle  is 
resident  in  every  part  of  space  reached  by  its  lines  of  force.  The 
electrical  body  may  be  said  to  extend  to  an  infinite  distance." 
"Wherever  there  is  potential  energy  there  is  mass."  "We  have 
confined  our  attention  in  this  article  to  the  view  that  the  constitu- 


MIND  AND  BODY  369 

tion  of  matter  is  electrical;  we  have  done  so  because  this  view  is 
more  closely  in  touch  with  experiment  than  any  other  yet  ad- 
vanced. The  units  of  which  matter  is  built  up  have  been  isolated 
and  detected  in  the  laboratory,  and  we  may  hope  to  discover  more 
and  more  of  their  properties."  4  The  electric  theory  of  matter 
postulates  two  factors  to  explain  matter  in  the  ordinary  sense. 
These  are  discrete  units,  the  electrons ;  and  a  continuous  medium, 
the  all-pervading  ether,  an  immensely  tenuous,  but  strong  and 
elastic  fluid,  capable  of  sustaining  great  variations  of  tension  or 
stress  and  strain.  From  this  standpoint  the  basis  of  difference 
in  our  sensuous  matter  are  variations  in  the  tension  of  the  ether ; 
in  other  words,  variations  of  stress  and  strain,  and,  consequently, 
of  motions  in  the  ether.5  Lodge  surmises  that  the  electron  may  be 
a  tension  in  the  ether.  I  have  cited  this  theory,  both  because  it  is 
the  most  plausible  theory  of  matter  at  the  present  time,  and  be- 
cause it  illustrates  two  points  fundamental  to  a  philosophy  of 
nature:  (1)  that  any  theory  of  the  physical  world,  to  be  satis- 
factory, must  include  both  discreteness  and  continuity.  Atoms 
and  electrons  must  have  a  medium ;  whether  this  medium  be  called 
ether  of  space,  or  space  itself,  it  must  be  something  continuous. 
The  interaction  of  things  across  nothing  is  unintelligible.  If 
matter  have  a  granular  structure,  then  there  must  be  a  continuous 
medium  in  which  these  granules  interact.  There  must  be  lines 
and  fields  of  force  that  irradiate  in  all  directions  from  them. 
(2)  The  electrical  theory  of  matter,  reducing,  as  it  does,  the 
phenomena  of  mass  or  inertia  and  weight  to  stresses  and  strains  or 
motions  and  tensions  in  a  universal  medium,  furnishes  a  powerful 
support,  from  the  field  of  physical  research,  for  the  view  that  the 
physical  world  as  empirical  reality  is  the  manifestation  of  a  system 
of  centers  of  activity. 

In  the  present  connection  I  desire  to  emphasize  the  following 
points:  (1)  Body  is  to  be  conceived  in  terms  of  activity.  It  is 
a  complex  of  dynamic  centers.  (2)  Actual  bodies  have  concrete 
extensities.  Extensity  in  this  sense  is  the  expression  of  tension  or 
physical  activity.     Homogeneous  and  infinitely  divisible  space  is 


4  Sir  J.  J.  Thompson,  article  "Matter,"  Encyclopedia  Britannica,  11th  Ed., 
Volume  xvii.  See  also  F.  Soddy,  Matter  and  Energy;  J.  J.  Thomson,  Elec- 
tricity and  Matter ;  and  E.  Kutherford,  Radio-active  Transformations. 

5  Sir  Oliver  Lodge,  The  Ether  of  Space,  especially  Chap.  8,  ' '  Ether  and 
Matter." 


/ 


370  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

a  conceptual  or  ideal  construction  relative  to  the  purposes  of 
geometry  and  mechanics.  Actual  physical  space  is  the  order  of 
inter-relations  of  simultaneously  existing,  heterogeneous,  centers 
of  activity.  (3)  Hence  bodies  are  not  infinitely  divisible.  They 
must  consist  of  ultimate  centers  of  activity.  (4)  All  bodies  are 
elements  in  the  total  continuum  of  physical  reality,  which  is  a  vast 
system  of  tensions  and  motions.  Motion  is  detention,  that  is, 
release  of  a  tension.  Concrete  or  real  space  means  the  coexistence 
and  interrelation  of  centers  of  activity  or  dynamic  and  mobile 
elements. 

If  it  is  misleading  to  define  body  in  terms  of  inert  and  homo- 
geneous space,  it  is  equally  misleading  to  say  that  mind  is  unex- 
tended.     Mind  is  not  static  extension,  but  neither  is  body.     And 
mental  processes  are  not  nonspatial  but  trans-spatial.     It  is  time  j 
that  philosophy  emancipated  itself  from  the  naive  distinction  be- 
tween matter  and  spirit  in  terms  of  the  contrast  between  the 
;  extended  and  the  unextended.     This  is  a  heritage  from  Greek  and 
mediaeval  thought  that  we  can  well  dispense  with.     Visual  and 
tactual  percepts  obviously  have  extensity.     Auditory,  olfactory, 
and  other  forms  of  sensation,  likewise  have  extensity  or  bigness. 
C*  Moreover  it  seems  to  me  that  affections  and  emotions  likewise  have 
\       location  and  extensity.     Some  are  pervasive  and  spread  all  over 
.0^    the  body.     Others  are  narrowly  localized,  sharp,  penetrating,  and 
L'^so  forth.    Is  the  mind,  then,  which  is  the  center  of  reference  for  all 
these  forms  of  awareness,  nonspatial  ?    Clearly,  I  think,  the  mind 
is  in  the  body.     It  is  the  conscious  unifier  and  center  of  tension 
of  bodily  experience.     Just  what  part  of  the  body  it  commonly 
inhabits  I  am  not  sure.    It  seems  to  be  able  to  expand  and  pervade 
large  parts  of  the  whole,  and  to  gather  and  condense  itself  into 
narrower  compass.     With  the  ideal  or  higher  forms  of  thought- 
activity  and  sentiment  we  seem  to  be  in  the  presence  of  purely 
unextended  processes.    A  concept,  a  judgment  concerning  abstruse 
matters  such  as  the  present  problem,  or  a  clearly  formulated  pur- 
pose,   is   a   maximum   concentration    and    unification   of   mental 
activity.     But  even  such  activities  as  these  are  associated  with  a 
concretely  extended  body  which  is  in  relation  to  other  extensive 
realities.     A  purpose  or  a  plan  of  action  are  obviously  concerned 
with  the  relations  of  the  individual  organism  to  contemporaneously 
existing  elements  of  spatial  reality.     Such  thought  activities  con- 
dense the  past  with  reference  to  the  future,  but  this  condensation 


1 


MIND  AND  BODY  371 

implies  coexistence  and  interrelation  or  extensity.     Even  such 
"spiritual"  processes  as  an  aesthetic  emotion,  a  moral  ideal,  a 
religious  aspiration,  or  a  metaphysical  speculation,  involve  the 
relation  of  the  mind  to  coexisting  realities  which  have  relative 
mutual  independence.     Mind,  as  a  center  of  concentration  and 
awareness  of  relationships,  has  a  power  of  controlling  and  pene- 
trating, of  condensing  and  redirecting,  the  extensity-f  actors  or  j 
spatial  tensions  of  its  physical  environment  to  such  a  degree  that 1 
we  may  rightly  say  that  mind  is  a  trans-spatial  center  of  action./ 
Functioning  in  space  it  can  become,  in  increasing  measure,  thej 
master  of  space. 

There  is  then,  an  immaterial,  dynamic  principle  in  the  human 
self.     Consciousness  is  not  a  form  of  physical  energy ;  but  it  is  at 
once  the  immediate  revelation  of  a  unique  kind  of  energy,  the! 
energy  of  thought ;  and  the  intermediate  revelation  of  other  forms) 
of  energy  by  virtue  of  being  a  focal  center  of  awareness,  selection, 
rearrangement,  and  chosen  reaction.     The  energy  of  mind  is  ex- 
pressed in  intellection  and  volition.     These  cannot  really  be  sep- 
arated, since  volition  involves  intellection  and  intellection  is  the 
activity  of  the  mind   in  selecting,   combining  and  valuing  the 
materials  of  experience.    Thus  the  specific  character  of  the  energy 
of  the  mind  is  most  adequately  revealed  in  the  rational  activity 
of  synthesis  and  analysis  and  in  the  forms  of  reflective  valuation 
which  determine  choice.     Mind -energy,  or  spiritual  activity,  is  ///j 
associated  with  a  physical  machine,  the  body,  through  which  it//  p   f 
receives  influences  from,  and  reacts  upon,  its  environment.     Thus/      '«■  ^ 
the  mind,  although  it  does  not  seem  to  occupy  a  definite  area  in 
space,  is  definitely  associated  with  the  spatial  order  in  which  it 
carries  on  transactions.     The  mind  is  the  soul  of  a  dynamic  con-  ^it- 
figuration  in  space.    It  is  trans-spatial,  not  nonspatial.    Similarly 
the  mind,  as  we  shall  see  more  fully  later  on,  is  not  nontemporal, 
but  transtemporal.     It  endures  through  time. 

Where  there  is  no  recognitive  memory  and  selective  choice,  the 
successive  phases  of  physical  motion  are  mere  links  in  an  endless 
chain.  One  configuration  dies  away  blindly  into  its  successor.  It 
is  through  selective  memory  that  the  past  lives  in  the  present,  not 
as  fatally  determining  it,  but  as  reconstructed  and  employed  by 
the  active  mind  to  illumine  the  present,  and  thus  to  aid  in  the 
conscious  direction  of  activity  to  fashion  the  future.  Just  as  there 
is  no  sharp  break  between  past  and  present,  so  there  is  no  sharp 


372  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

break  between  present  and  future.  The  present  is  the  future  in 
the  making.  Memory  is  the  unifying  function  which  enables  the 
individual  in  the  present  to  control  the  future  by  the  utilization 
of  the  past  in  the  present.  A  being  devoid  of  memory  can  have 
the  continuity  only  of  a  succession  of  stages,  in  which  the  earlier 
always  completely  determine  the  later.  Its  moving  spring  is  a 
vis  a  tergo,  that  is,  a  physical  force.  A  being  with  memory, 
selectivity  and  reflection,  by  transcending  its  immediate  present, 
or  rather  by  expanding  and  transfusing  that  present  from  the  past, 
is  able  to  emancipate  itself  from  the  vis  a  tergo.  Its  present  grows 
in  content  and  meaning,  and  thus  its  future,  as  this  becomes 
present,  ceases  to  be  the  mere  consequence  of  its  past.  A  being 
without  memory  lives  only  in  space  although  it  exists  in  time.6 
Temporal  relations  are  for  it  nonexistent.  It  cannot  transcend  the 
immediate  now,  and  hence,  for  it  there  is  no  now,  since  a  now 
has  meaning  only  by  contrast  with  a  then  and  a  shall-be.  A  being 
with  memory  transcends  mere  spatial  relationships.  It  becomes 
a  temporal-historical  self-determining  being.  Memory-conscious- 
ness is  the  fundamental  condition  of  selfhood  and  self-determina- 
tion. Space  is  a  function  of  immediate  interaction  between  indi- 
vidua  or  monads,  but  time  is  a  function  of  memory;  time-con- 
sciousness is  the  condition  of  the  suspension  of  the  blind  and  in- 
evitable march  of  temporal  predetermination.  In  this  sense  to 
know  time  and  change,  through  memory  and  reflection,  is  to 
transcend  mere  time  and  change  in  transcending  mere  spatial 
coexistence  and  determination. 

In  memory  we  find,  then,  as  Bergson  rightly  says,  a  unique 
function  of  spirit.7    It  is  by  virtue  of  the  synthetic  or  synoptic  and 

6  Cf.  Leibniz '  body-monads,  with  appetition  but  without  memory. 

'  My  conception  of  memory  is  not  the  same  as  Bergson 's,  however.  Mem- 
ory in  its  highest  form  I  conceive  to  be  the  result  of  the  synthetic  functioning 
of  the  self  which  gives  identity  and  continuity  of  meaning  to  sense  images.  I 
should  place  much  greater  stress  than  he  seems  to  on  the  function  of  logical  or 
synthetic  meaning  as  the  distinctive  work  of  memory,  in  contrast  with  mere 
recollection  or  routine  associative  recall. 

Significant  memory  works  by  the  discovery  of,  and  selective  emphasis  on, 
likenesses  and  unlikenesses,  identities  and  diversities,  whole-part  relations, 
causal  relations,  teleological  relations,  etc.;  in  short  by  the  use  of  logical  cate- 
gories. Even  in  fortuitous  chains  of  association  and  recall,  these  logical  prin- 
ciples operate.  The  great  differences  between  random  and  irrelevant  memories, 
on  the  one  hand,  and  significance  or  relevant  memories,  on  the  other  hand,  is 
that  the  latter  operate  through  significant  and  useful  resemblances  and  dif- 
ferences, whereas  the  former  operate  through  superficial  resemblances  and 
differences  and  thus  carry  a  burden  of  useless  and  smothering  detail.    A  good 


MIND  AND  BODY  373 

selective  power  manifested  in  memory  that  the  individual  ceases 
to  be  a  mere  blind  link  in  an  endless  chain  of  becoming;  that  he  is 
able  to  suspend  the  fatal  operation  of  that  vis  a  tergo  by  which 
nonmental  elements  of  reality  are  pushed  along,  combined  and 
broken  up,  made  and  unmade. 

The  mind  is  that  sort  of  unique  and  active  center  or  focus  of 
relationships  which  is  able  to  concentrate  and  illuminate,  with 
memory  and  awareness,  the  dynamical  relations  of  elements  in  the 
system  of  physical  nature  to  its  own  immediate  organ — the  body; 
and,  through  this  relation  to  its  own  organism,  to  interpret  extra- 
bodily  relations  of  physical  and  other  psychophysical  centers  to 
one  another.  The  mind  is  also  able  to  be  aware  of  its  own  aware- 
nesses, that  is,  to  be  self-conscious.  It  has  temporal  continuity 
and  is  aware  of  this  continuity.  It  is  a  unity  and  a  unifier  which 
knows  itself  as  such.  Every  active  center  in  nature  must  be  in 
some  degree  a  unity  and  a  unifier.  Mind  is  peculiarly  so,  since,  by 
reason  of  its  bodily  organ,  it  becomes  the  center  of  a  variety  and 
range  of  physical  relationships  to  a  degree  such  as  no  other  thing 
in  nature  is,  and  since,  by  reason  of  memory  and  reflection,  it 
becomes  a  reorganizer  or  redirector  of  the  sequence  of  physical  'lu£/ 
events.  The  mind  is  the  organism's  consciousness  of  its  actual  and  I / 
possible  relationships  in  the  dynamic  system  of  reality.  Through 
consciousness,  the  organism  becomes  in  part  a  controlling  and  an 
originating  center  of  relationships.    Because  it  can  remember  and  / 

bring  to  bear  on  the  present  situation  its  past  recognition  of  rela- 
tionships within  the  system  of  experience,  the  mind  is  not  tied 
down  to  the  treadmill  of  a  mechanical  succession.  Through  it  the 
organism  is  freed  from  the  bondage  of  mere  reflex  and  automatic 
activity. 

Placed  temporally  between  the  incoming  stimuli  which  signify 
the  action  of  other  elements  of  reality  on  the  organism,  and  the 
outgoing  effectors  or  motor  impulses  which  signify  the  reactions 

and  useful  memory  has,  as  its  prime  condition,  a  high  power  of  analytic- 
synthetic  thinking ;  it  selects  and  emphasizes  relations  which  become  instruments 
for  recalling  relevant  experiences,  when  they  are  needed.  Bergson,  it  seems  to 
me,  almost  ignores  this  logical  character  of  memory.  For  him  the  vital  urge 
appears  to  go  on  more  or  less  blindly  creating  and  accumulating  ideas,  relevant 
and  irrelevant;  fortuitously  rolling  itself  up  like  a  snowball.  There  is  little  or 
no  logic  in  it.  His  conception  of  memory  is  too  economical;  but  it  seems  to  be 
a  natural  consequence  of  the  opposition  he  sets  up  between  intelligence  and 
intuition.  Indeed  Bergson 's  whole  philosophy  suffers  from  a  defective  logic  or 
theory  of  mind. 


374  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

of  the  organism  to  other  elements  of  reality,  the  mind  focuses  its 
past  experience  on  the  present,  and  thus  determines  in  part  the 
character  and  direction  of  the  organism's  reactions  to  the  environ- 
ment. This  determination  of  future  reaction  is  no  blind  automatic 
reaction  or  mere  reflex.  It  signifies  a  redirection  of  organic 
activity,  in  such  ways  that  the  content  of  individual  experience  is 
further  enriched  in  meaning  and  scope.  Operating  between  the 
organism's  past  and  its  future,  the  mind  is  able  in  part  to  deter- 
mine the  character  of  that  future,  to  enhance  its  life  by  enlarging 
the  scope  and  value  of  its  responses  or  adjustments.  Memory,  the 
synthetic  or  unifying  function  which  establishes  identity  and  con- 
tinuity of  meaning;  analytic  and  generalizing  thought,  which 
distills  new  meanings  by  analysis  and  synthetic  reconstruction  of 
experience;  and  evaluating  and  selective  choice,  are  thus  the 
supreme  functions  of  mind.  They  are  instruments  for  the  enlarge- 
ment of  insight  into  the  organism's  own  nature  and  the  nature  of 
its  environment,  and  thus  they  are  the  instruments  for  the  enhance- 
ment of  psychic  values  through  intelligent  action. 

The  body,  considered  as  a  system  of  sense  organs,  afferent 
nerves  and  sensory  brain  centers,  is  the  channel  through  which  the 
mind  becomes  aware  of  those  nearer  and  more  remote  environ- 
mental relationships  which  are  significant  for  the  life  and  welfare 
of  the  whole  psychophysical  individual.  Conversely,  the  body, 
considered  as  a  system  of  motor  brain  centers,  efferent  nerves,  and 
motor  organs  of  expression,  is  the  channel  through  which  mind 
effectuates,  in  terms  of  its  consciously  purposive  activities,  the 
meanings  and  values  which  it  has  distilled  from  its  incoming  ex- 
periences. There  can  be  little  doubt  that  the  brain  centers,  as  the 
common  term  in  this  sensory-reflective-motor  arc,  supply  a  vast, 
complicated,  and  plastic  system  of  connections,  through  which 
mind,  in  its  functions  of  remembering,  analyzing,  synthetizing, 
and  recombining  the  elements  of  raw  experience,  is  able  to  suspend 
mere  reflex  or  automatic  action ;  to  check  the  fatal  flow  of  stimulus 
into  blind  reaction,  and  thus,  by  giving  to  consciousness  an  accu- 
mulation or  enrichment  of  sensory  materials  joined  with  an 
indeterminate  complexity  of  outgoing  connections,  to  enable  the 
conscious  mind  to  "throw  the  switches" ;  to  divert  and  recombine 
in  a  variety  of  ways  the  sensory-motor  nerve  paths.  The  synapses 
of  the  dendritic  processes  of  the  cortical  neurone  cells  and  the 
interrelations  of  the  main  systems  of  nerve-fibers  seem  to  give 


MIND  AND  BODY  375 

structural  support  to  this  view.  Physical  stimulus — physiological 
reaction — physical  change  due  to  motor  organ — thus  would  run  a 
purely  reflex  activity.  Perception — memory — reflection — or  anal- 
ysis and  synthesis — choice — such  are  the  intervening  factors  of 
mind  which  breaks  the  fatal  chain.  The  diagram  of  a  volitional 
process  would  run  thus :  physical  stimulus — sensory  neural  process 
— awareness — memory — reflection  and  choice — motor  neural  proc- 
ess and  muscular  movement.  In  the  cognitive-volitional  arc,  mind 
is  the  conscious  center  for  redirection,  selective  emphasis  and 
control.  The  suspension  and  alteration  of  tension  and  direction 
in  the  neural  processes  is  the  work  of  mind. 

The  self  is  a  trans-spatial  center  of  spatial  relationships,  and 
thus  positively  related  to  extensity.  Through  the  sensory  system 
the  mind  is  brought  into  receptive  cognitive  relations  with  physical 
reality.  Through  the  motor  system  it  acts  as  member  of  the  total 
system  of  things.  From  the  extensity  of  sensations  to  the  apparent 
inextensity  of  "pure"  thought  there  is  a  series  of  degrees  of 
passage,  as  M.  Bergson  would  say,  from  more  extensity  with  less 
tension  to  less  extensity  with  greater  tension.  I  should  prefer  to 
say  that  there  is  a  passage,  by  degrees,  from  a  more  diffused  or 
less  integrated  extensity  of  motions  to  a  less  diffused  extensity  with 
the  highest  degree  of  trans-spatial  concentration  and  integration  or 
unification.  Mobile  extensity  is  not  eliminated  by  the  higher 
thought  processes.  These  processes  are  unique  concentrations  or 
condensations,  into  conscious  unity,  of  extensive  dynamical  trans- 
actions. Intensity  is  not  the  negation  of  extensity.  It  is  the 
maximum  concentration  or  focalization  of  extensities,  which  in 
consciousness  becomes  the  basis  of  the  redistribution  of  extensive 
relations  in  a  world  of  mobile  elements.  By  virtue  of  its  power  of 
concentration,  analysis,  and  integration,  the  mind  is  able  to 
redirect  physical  motions  so  as  partly  to  conquer  space  in  the 
transportation  of  bodies  and  the  intercommunication  of  minds.  By 
the  anticipatory  power  of  constructive  imagination,  the  mind  is 
able  to  project  itself  even  into  the  interplanetary  reaches  of  cosmic 
space,  and  this  projection  may  be  the  prelude  to  still  vaster  con- 
quests of  space-restrictions  by  man.  Thus,  though  associated  with 
a  space-occupying  body,  and  so  having  a  local  habitation,  the  mind 
is  not  determined  and  restricted  as  a  mere  physical  thing  is  deter- 
mined and  restricted  by  external  space  relations.  It  is  able  to 
internalize,   interpret  and  selectively  choose  among  these  space 


376  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

conditions,  and  thus,  in  part  control  them.  But  if  anyone  con- 
fesses himself  able  to  conceive  reality  as  spaceless  I  confess  my 
inability  to  follow  such  a  conceptual  flight  into  the  inane. 

In  short,  the  conscious  self  is  an  active  center  which  knows, 
evaluates,  chooses,  purposes,  and  acts  in  a  physical  universe.  How 
my  thought  and  purpose  get  translated  into  physical  motions  I  do 
not  know.  How  I  perceive  colors,  sounds,  tastes,  smells,  heat  and 
cold,  I  do  not  fully  understand,  the  physiologists'  and  psychol- 
ogists' explanations  notwithstanding.  I  do  not  understand  how 
vibrations  of  ether  or  air  occasion  neural  activities,  and  how  these 
in  turn  occasion  sensory-motor  processes.  I  have  to  come  back  to 
the  simple  and  universal  fact  that  man  sees  with  his  eyes,  hears 
with  his  ears,  and  smells  with  his  nose.  The  universality  of  the 
fact,  and  the  success  of  inferences  and  activities  based  thereon, 
warrant  the  belief  that  the  world  which  man  thus  perceives,  and 
which  is  the  only  physical  world  that  he  does  have  any  immediate 
acquaintance  with,  is  truly  an  integral  part  of  the  order  of  reality ; 
although  it  may  very  well  be  the  case  that  man's  belief  as  to  the 
place  of  his  physical  environment  in  the  scheme  of  things  is  in  part 
erroneous,  or  rather,  very  imperfectly  represents  the  complete  state 
of  things.  In  any  event  any  speculation  which  does  not  base  itself 
on  the  belief  in  the  reality  of  the  physical  order,  as  perceived,  is 
open  from  the  outset  to  the  gravest  suspicion.  Our  physical  order 
must  be  a  true  part  or  constituent  of  the  total  real. 

Similarly,  I  come  back  to  the  simple  fact  that  I  understand, 
evaluate  and  plan,  choose  and  act  through  my  body  upon  the 
physical  things  around  me.  The  fact  that  we  do  not  fully  under- 
stand why  minds  should  be  conditioned  by  bodies,  and  vice  versa, 
is  not  sufficient  reason  for  denying  that  the  relationship  in  ques- 
tion does  obtain.  Throughout  the  world  of  experience  we  find  that 
life,  with  all  its  meanings  and  interests,  involves  contrast  and 
opposition.  Is  not  the  contrast  and  opposition  of  body  and  mind, 
which  yet  are  functionally  interdependent,  perhaps  just  the  most 
universal  marriage  of  opposites  on  which  depends  all  the  zest  and 
significance  of  life  ?  Here  we  seem  to  touch  bottom  facts  of  experi- 
ence. If  mind  and  body  were  absolutely  identical  their  seeming 
duality  or  contrast  would  be  a  meaningless  riddle.  If  they  were 
absolutely  independent,  even  though  parallel,  their  mutual  isola- 
tion and  correspondence  would  be  equally  an  insoluble  riddle. 
Why  should  two  such  fundamental  aspects  of  existence  always  run 


MIND  AND  BODY  377 

abreast  but  never  touch?  In  such  case  they  would  not  be  two 
aspects  but  two  wholly  sundered  universes.  Cleft  by  an  impassable 
chasm  there  would  be  two  worlds — the  one  a  realm  of  insensate 
masses  in  space — the  other  a  realm  of  gibbering  ghosts.  The 
assumption  of  the  absolute  identity  and  the  utter  disconnectedness 
of  mind  and  body  are  equally  meaningless.  Reality  is  psycho- 
physical individuality. 

APPENDIX  I 

MATTER,   ENERGY,   AND  WILL 

The  concept  of  matter  is  a  logical  construction  to  complete  our 
picture  of  a  world  which,  empirically,  is  incomplete  and  consists  of 
complexes  of  sensory  qualities  or  physical  things  and  psychical  com- 
plexes or  experients. 

The  concept  of  matter  which  is  advocated  in  the  present  work  is 
the  dynamic  or  energetic  view.  Mass,  impenetrability,  space-occu- 
pancy, are  expressions  of  the  natures  and  interrelations  of  centers  of 
energy. 

Will  is  the  consciously  directed  energy  of  a  psychical  agent.  In- 
deed, as  we  have  previously  insisted,  all  our  beliefs  in  external  ener- 
gies, physical  agencies,  are  inferences  from  our  personal  experiences 
of  suffering  and  action  in  relation  to  the  environment.  It  does  not 
follow  that  physical  energies  and  human  will  are  to  be  reduced  to 
a  common  denominator,  or  that  all  energy  is  really  volitional.  To 
argue  that,  since  we  recognize  and  infer  the  existence  of  energy  and 
activity  in  the  world,  only  in  relation  to  human  actions  and  suffer- 
ings, therefore  all  activity  must  necessarily  be  of  the  volitional  type 
is  to  assume  the  homeopathic  dogma  that  all  that  is  known  must  be 
like  that  which  knows.  It  is  tantamount  to  saying  that  the  absurd 
principle  "he  who  drives  fat  oxen  must  himself  be  fat"  may  be  ele- 
vated into  a  supreme  ontological  law.  It  does  not  follow  that,  be- 
cause conscious  agency  can  direct  physical  energies,  therefore  the 
latter  must  be  volitional  agencies  in  disguise. 

Empirically  there  are  two  kinds  of  agency,  physical  and  psychical. 
It  may  be  that  physical  energy  is  the  expression  of  a  world  will,  or 
it  may  be  that  physical  energy  is  eternal  and  unoriginated.  This 
problem  we  shall  discuss  when  we  take  up  the  question  of  the  ulti- 
mate unity  of  things.  Certainly,  physical  energies  are  powers  that 
we  must  take  account  of  in  the  fulfillment  of  our  human  purposes.  In 
no  other  fashion  do  we  find  grounds  for  recognizing  their  existence. 
Possibly,  the  most  tenable  conception  of  the  ultimate  and  universal 


378  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

reality  is  that,   in  some  mysterious  fashion,  all  physical  energies 
further  the  fulfillment  of  values. 


APPENDIX  II 

THE   ORIGIN   OF   THE    SOUL 

In  the  history  of  thought  there  are  three  chief  theories  of  the 
origin  of  the  soul,  all  based  on  the  assumption  that  the  soul  is  not 
an  epiphenomenon  or  by-product  of  physical  processes.  These  theo- 
ries are: 

1.  Preexistence  or  metempsychosis. 

2.  Traducianism  and 

3.  Creationism. 

The  doctrine  of  preexistence,  metempsychosis  or  transmigration, 
is  found,  to  name  only  a  few  of  its  best  known  exemplars,  in  the 
Hindu  Upanishads,  the  Buddhist  Scriptures,  the  Pythagoreans, 
Orphics  and  Plato  in  Ancient  Greece,  in  Bruno,  Leibniz,  and  in 
present-day  philosophy  notably  in  Dr.  J.  M.  E.  McTaggart.  Ac- 
cording to  this  doctrine  souls  are  eternal;  their  number  is  eternally 
fixed,  and  the  birth  and  death  of  earthborn  individuals  are  simply 
critical  phases  in  the  soul's  pilgrimage  through  time.  In  the  form 
which  Plato  gives  to  the  doctrine,  in  his  myths,  the  rational  or  spirit- 
ual part  of  the  soul  enters  our  world  of  space  and  time  as  a  conse- 
quence of  a  fall  from  the  changeless,  eternal  realm  of  the  eternal 
essences  or  ideas,  wages  its  warfare  in  this  earthly  order,  and  after 
death  passes  upward  or  downward  in  the  world  of  its  next  embodi- 
ment in  accord  with  the  manner  in  which  it  has  acquitted  itself  here. 
The  supreme  evidence  of  the  soul's  preexistence  and  the  pledge  of 
its  post-existence.  Plato  finds  in  its  participation  in  the  ideas,  or 
essential  forms,  of  logical  universals,  beauty  and  goodness.  During 
its  earthly  career  the  soul  wakens  to  a  clearer  recollection  and  fuller 
possession  of  the  forms  of  which  it  had  vision,  and  with  which  it  had 
full  communion,  in  the  supernal  realm. 

Wordsworth's  Ode  on  Intimations  of  Immortality  is  probably  the 
best  known  expression  of  this  doctrine  in  English. 

The  doctrine  of  preexistence  has  a  perennial  attractiveness  to 
speculative  minds.  It  seems  to  be  the  simplest  alternative  to  ma- 
terialism; it  offers  a  plausible  doctrine  to  account  for  the  innate  or 
a  priori  capacities  of  the  soul — for  the  logical  structure  of  reason  and 
the  ideals  of  beauty  and  goodness  which  haunt  and  prick  to  action 
the  noblest  minds.  The  Kantian  and  cognate  doctrines  of  a  priorism 
are  akin  to  it.    Nevertheless,  it  is  surely  at  variance  with  the  facts 


MIND  AND  BODY  379 

of  mental  heredity  and  development.  If  the  individual  spirit  is  a 
preexistent  and  eternal  reality,  why  should  not  the  normal  self  have 
more  concrete  and  specific  memories  of  its  preexisting  states  of  being  ? 
Why  should  one  not  be  able  to  recollect  clearly  his  personal  status 
and  social  relationships  of  several  thousand  years  ago?  Why  should 
men  not  come  more  quickly  to  agreement  in  regard  to  logical,  ethical, 
moral  and, 'in  a  word,  to  spiritual,  values?  If  this  doctrine  be  true 
then  this  world  is  not  a  "vale  of  soul  making"  but  simply  of  soul 
reawakening.  Then,  too,  we  make  no  real  progress  here  or  hereafter ; 
we  simply  recover  what  we  had  previously  lost.  What  the  soul  pre- 
viously possessed  clearly,  for  some  mysterious  reason  becomes  ob- 
scured here  and  now. 

The  traducianist  theory  is  that  the  souls  of  offspring  are  gen- 
erated from  the  souls  of  their  parents,  as  their  bodies  are  from  the 
bodies  of  their  parents.  Biologists  of  to-day  seem  quite  generally  to 
accept  the  doctrine  of  the  continuity  of  the  germ  plasm  and  the 
Mendelian  doctrine  of  heredity,  according  to  which  unit  characters 
persist  from  generation  to  generation,  and  may  be  combined,  disso- 
ciated and  recombined,  as  the  generations  come  and  go.  Thus  the 
body  of  a  child  is  not  so  much  the  immediate  offspring  of  its  parent 
body  as  it  is  of  the  germ  plasm — a  complex  of  unit  characters  which 
are  transmitted  through  the  parent  organisms  and  presumably  are 
modified  during  the  transmission.  (There  is  much  dispute  on  the 
latter  point.)  Thus  the  body  of  a  child  is  the  resultant  of  a  combina- 
tion of  unit  characters  effected  through  the  reproductive  process  and 
modified  by  the  environment.  The  soul  must  be,  then,  either  an 
entirely  fresh  creation,  or  be  the  resultant  of  a  new  combination  of 
psychical  unit  characters  transmitted  in  the  germ  plasm  and  combined 
through  the  procreative  act.  Either  the  mental  or  spiritual  principle 
of  creative  synthesis  is  transmitted  through  the  germ  plasm,  or  it 
is  injected  into  the  fertilized  ovum  at  some  stage  in  the  latter's  career 
by  an  act  of  special  creation. 

The  special  creation  theory  of  the  soul's  origin  has  been  widely 
accepted.  It  is  difficult  to  refute  such  a  theory  directly,  since  we 
have  not  the  data  to  say  just  when  and  how  reason  or  spirit  begins 
to  function  consciously,  whether  at  conception,  at  some  later  point 
in  prenatal  life,  or  after  birth.  We  do  know,  however,  that  while 
there  are  critical  epochs  in  the  history  of  the  individual  reason  or 
spirit — such  is  the  beginning  of  self-consciousness,  the  storm  and 
stress  of  adolescence,  the  wakening  of  ethical  and  religious  reflection, 
the  coming  to  consciousness  of  ethical,  intellectual  and  other  forms 
of  creative  impulse — these  crises  are  the  results  of  long  psychical 
incubation.     The  life  of  reason  or  spirit  is  more  continuous  than  at 


380  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

first  blush  it  appears  to  be.  The  facts  of  mental  and  moral  heredity 
tell  against  the  special  creation  hypothesis. 

I  conclude,  therefore,  that  the  spiritual  or  rational  principle  of 
creative  synthesis,  the  divine  spark  in  mind,  is  the  endless  immanent 
potency  of  the  creation  of  spiritual  individuality  transmitted  and 
bursting  into  actuality  generation  after  generation  as  an  immanent 
continuity  of  spiritual  life  process.  The  process  of  generation  is  the 
creative  process,  not  only  in  the  sense  of  the  creation  of  new  vital 
and  psychical  individuals,  by  ever  varying  combinations  of  the  funda- 
mental unit  characters  of  man,  but,  as  well,  of  the  continuous  crea- 
tion of  new  spiritual  individualities.  It  is  a  process  of  continuous 
creation,  of  new  centers  of  creative  synthesis,  of  a  higher  kind  than 
the  other  forms  of  creative  synthesis  manifested  in  the  various 
grades  and  stages  of  cosmic  evolution. 

In  short  mental  or  spiritual  individualities  working  through  the 
procreative  act  are  the  endlessly  fecund  sources  of  new  mental  indi- 
vidualities.    Tennyson  writes: 

A  soul  shall  draw  from  out  the  vast 
And  strike  his  being  into  bounds  8 

Again  he  writes: 

Of  that  infinite  One 
Who  made  thee  unconquerably  Thyself 
Out  of  this  whole  world — Self  and  all  in  all — 
Live  thou!  and  of  the  grain  and  husk,  the  grape 
And  ivy  berry  choose;  and  still  depart 
From  death  to  death  thro  life  and  life,  and  find 
Nearer  and  ever  nearer  Him,  who  wrought 
Not  matter,  nor  the  finite-infinite 
But  this  main  miracle,  that  thou  art  thou, 
With  power  on  thine  own  act  and  on  the  world.9 

Such  utterances,  like  the  words  of  religious  seers  and  philosophers, 
express  in  imaginative  form  the  superlative  estimate  of  value  and 
meaning  as  inhering  in  spiritual  individuality  or  personality.  They 
formulate,  in  terms  of  cosmic  origin  and  relationships,  that  faith  in 
the  worth  and  dignity  of  the  human  spirit  which  accompanies  every 
creative  deed  and  vision  in  human  kind.  Can  one  translate  these 
utterances  into  the  plain  prose  of  philosophy  and  square  them  in  any 
fashion  with  the  findings  of  reason? 

*In  Memoriam.     Sixth  stanza  from  the  end. 
*De  Profundis. 


MIND  AND  BODY  381 

The  spirit  or  reason  or  creative  imagination  is  the  principle  of 
creative  synthesis,  through  the  operation  of  which  the  biological 
complex  of  psychophysical  unit  characters  forming  the  newborn 
individual,  becomes  a  personality;  the  rational  or  spiritual  self,  self- 
determining  and  capable  of  serving  and  achieving  intrinsic  values. 
The  "spirit,"  as  the  principle  of  rational  integration,  is  evoked  into 
activity  through  the  urgent  needs  of  redirection  and  organization  of 
the  native  biological  tendencies  (the  natural  man).  Thus,  we  may 
say,  the  spiritual  principle  in  man  is  a  principle  of  supervenient  re- 
flective integration  "granted,"  as  Lotze  puts  it,  by  the  order  of  the 
universe  to  a  specific  vital  constellation. 

The  division  of  reality  into  two  realms,  "natural"  and  "super- 
natural," has  its  source  in  an  estimation  of  relative  values.  If  nature 
be  conceived  as  an  insensate  mechanism,  or  at  best  an  unconscious 
vital  urge;  then  the  principle  of  valuation,  namely,  that  the  values 
of  directive  and  creative  thought,  of  moral  insight  and  volition,  of 
aesthetic  creation  and  religious  communion  are  the  highest  and 
worthiest  functions  of  man,  lead  to  the  assertion  that  the  source  of 
these  values  is  supernature.  In  any  adequate  philosophical  sense  of 
nature,  the  life  of  values,  the  life  of  spirit,  is  just  as  natural  as  the 
bodily  life.  Indeed  the  spiritual  works  are  higher  and  truer  because 
richer  and  more  adequate  expressions  of  the  total  meaning  of  the 
real  than  merely  sentient  organisms  and  their  works,  and  higher 
still  than  physicochemical  complexes  and  functions.  The  personal 
spirit  and  its  works  furnish  our  best  key  to  the  meaning  of  the 
cosmos,  since  personality  is  the  most  macrocosmic  of  all  finite  forms 
of  existence, 


CHAPTER  XXVIII 

PERSONALITY  AND  THE  CULTURAL  ORDER 

The  natural  self,  that  is,  the  human  being  considered  simply 
as  an  animal  organism,  is  not  a  person.  He  becomes  a  person  only 
through  development  in  the  medium  of  a  system  of  social  culture 
or  nurture.  Owing  to  the  overweight  of  biological  thinking  to-day 
in  psychology,  sociology,  and  philosophy,  and  also  owing  in  part 
to  the  grievous  wounds  that  the  occidental  systems  of  social  culture 
have  received  in  the  late  war,  there  is  grave  danger  of  our  minimiz1 
ing  the  significance  of  social  institutions  and  of  the  whole  social 
ethos  in  the  development  of  personality.  Even  so-called  savages 
have  closely  knit  systems  of  social  culture.  "The  state  of  nature," 
whether  conceived  in  terms  of  Hobbes  or  Rousseau,  would  be  a 
condition  in  which  human  beings  could  not  be  human  beings. 
Whatsoever  genuine  progress  may  have  taken  place  in  human 
history,  has  consisted  solely  in  the  development  of  cultural  systems 
better  adapted  to  the  nurture  of  the  qualities  which  constitute 
human  personality.  A  one-sided  and  unhistorical  regard  for  the 
results  and  methods  of  natural  science  leads  men  to  ignore  the 
fact  that  natural  science  can  flourish  only  as  an  element  in  a 
system  of  social  culture  and  as  ministering  to  the  development  of 
human  personality.  Equally,  an  exclusive  regard  for  the  biological 
pit  from  which  man  has  been  digged  leads  psychology  to  ignore, 
and  even  to  deny,  the  existence  of  those  qualities  of  personality 
which  have  been  engendered  in  the  life  of  culture,  but  which  can- 
not be  measured  in  laboratories  or  found  by  anatomical  and 
physiological  study  of  the  genus  homo  of  the  Simian  group. 

The  great  idealists,  Plato,  Fichte,  Hegel,  Royce,  and  Bosanquet 
are  great  idealists  precisely  because,  in  one  fashion  or  another, 
they  have  clearly  recognized  that  it  is  through  participation  in  the 
objective  structures  of  social  culture  that  man  rises  to  the  stature 
of  personality,  and  therefore,  than  an  adequate  philosophical  inter- 
pretation of  experience  must  accord  a  central  place  to  the  achieve- 

382 


PERSONALITY  AND  THE  CULTURAL  ORDER       383 

ments  and  activities  of  culture — to  the  objective  mind,  to  use 
Hegel's  term — in  and  through  which  the  subjective  mind  of  the 
human  animal  develops  personality.  It  is  in  the  spirit  of  the 
great  idealists,  though  in  my  own  way,  that  I  wish  now  to  consider 
the  general  features  of  the  interaction  between  the  individual  and 
cultural  systems.1 

I  will  begin  by  summarizing  briefly  some  commonplaces  of 
social  psychology.  The  self-development  of  the  individual  involves 
the  direction  and  control  of  his  congenital  impulses  by  social  pat- 
terns in  action  and  thought.  Under  the  play  of  cultural  influences 
resident  in  the  social  system,  the  individual  is  awakened  to  norms 
or  general  standards  of  conduct  and  thought.  In  this  way  he 
becomes  socialized,  or  moralized  and  rationalized.  His  activity  is 
controlled,  and  his  thinking  and  feeling  are  shaped,  by  the  typical 
social  attitudes  which  are  embodied  in  the  customs  and  institutions 
which  constitute  the  cultural  system  of  a  society;  such  as  the 
institutions  of  the  family,  the  community,  industrial  life,  the  state 
and  the  church ;  the  prevailing  bodies  of  belief  and  modes  of 
valuation  in  regard  to  politics,  morals,  art,  education  and  religion. 
Thus  persons  are  developed  from  human  animals,  through  their 
individual  assimilation  of  the  current  systems  of  belief  and  con- 
duct, by  their  reactions  to  the  established  types  of  social  judgment 
and  valuation.  As  the  person  develops,  if  the  actual  social  ethos 
be  spiritually  poverty-stricken  or  restrictive,  he  may  seek  spiritual 
sustenance  in  the  richer  past,  or  he  may  strive  to  create  new  values. 
But  I  opine  that,  if  dissatisfied  with  the  spiritual  ethos  of  the 
present,  the  individual  strives  to  create  new  values  by  violently 
breaking  with  cultural  history  and  shooting  out  of  the  blue,  it  is 
unlikely  that  he  will  add  greatly  to  the  sum  of  human  culture. 

In  the  process  of  being  socialized,  or  moralized  and  rational- 
ized, the  individual  becomes  a  better  organized  and  more  repre- 
sentative self,  through  the  better  articulation  of  his  congenital 

1  The  ideas  embodied  in  the  present  chapter  were  first  stated  by  me  in 
a  paper  read  before  the  American  Philosophical  Association  in  December,  1904, 
and  which  appeared  in  the  Philosophical  Review  for  1905,  Vol.  xiv,  pp.  669-683. 
I  discussed  the  subject  further  in  an  article  entitled  "Ethics,  Sociology  and 
Personality,  Philosophical  Eeview,  Vol.  xv,  pp.  494-510.  Prof.  G.  P.  Adam's 
Idealism  and  the  Modem  Age  brings  out  in  a  somewhat  different  way  some 
of  the  main  points  in  this  attitude.  Dr.  Florian  Znanieeki's  Cultural  Reality 
is  an  interesting  introduction  to  a  philosophy  of  culture.  The  German 
Kultur-Philosophen,  especially  Windelband,  Bkskert,  and  Scheler,  have  con- 
tributed important  discussions  to  this  matter. 


384  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

capacities  and  through  the  growth  of  his  aims  in  concreteness  and 
social  reference.  All  aspects  of  the  self  share  in  the  generalization 
and  articulation  of  character  effected  by  interpersonal  intercourse. 
The  emotional  reactions  and  will-attitudes  of  the  individual  con- 
tinue to  be  uniquely  his  own ;  but,  under  the  influence  of  the  social 
reason  and  social  types  of  action  and  feeling,  individual  feeling 
gains  at  once  in  breadth  of  range  and  fineness  of  organization. 
Thus  the  individual,  as  self-determining  agent,  comes  to  regard  his 
own  individuality  as  the  servant  and  organ  of  the  intrinsic  spirit- 
ual values  which  are  the  basis  of  the  cultural  life — the  values  of 
truth,  justice,  friendship,  fellowship,  love,  beauty,  and  holiness. 
Thus  the  individual  becomes  an  integral  and  cooperant  member 
of  the  social  system  of  wills.  Thus,  as  the  organ  for  the  expression 
and  realization  of  social  and  ideal  values,  he  takes  on  a  more  sig- 
nificant, organized,  and  universal  character. 

The  social  occasions  for  the  individual's  activity  consist  in  the 
various  historical  systems  or  complex  bodies  of  thought  and  con- 
duct, in  the  atmosphere  of  which  he  is  nurtured  and  which  confront 
him  with  their  explicit  demands  and  commands.  Viewed  as  a 
totality,  these  systems  constitute  the  cultural-historical  ethos  or 
spirit  of  a  time,  a  nation,  a  community.  In  law  and  morals,  in 
politics,  in  science,  and  in  religion  and  art,  the  individual  member 
of  a  given  period,  nation,  and  community,  finds  himself  confronted 
with  more  or  less  coherent  group-systems  which  demand  his  loyal 
obedience  or  explicit  rejection,  his  allegiance,  criticism,  or  trans- 
formation. 

These  systems  grow  and  change  as  they  get  summed  up  and 
modified  in  and  through  the  actions  of  successive  series  of  social 
groups  and  of  individuals.  Illustrations  of  such  systems  or  his- 
torical complexes  of  ideas  lie  everywhere  at  hand  in  the  institu- 
tions of  contemporary  civilization.  Such  are,  for  example,  the 
established  average  code  of  customary  morality  (SittlichJceit)  •  the 
body  of  authoritative  current  scientific  opinion;  codes  of  social 
manners ;  the  working  systems  of  industrial  groups  such  as  trade- 
unions,  employer's  associations,  etc. ;  political  systems  of  ideas 
(democracy,  socialism,  imperialism,  party  traditions,  etc.)  ;  sys- 
tems of  religious  doctrine  and  practice  represented  by  various 
churches  and  sects  which,  of  course,  are  preeminently  embodiments 
of  historical  complexes  of  ideas,  etc.  It  is  through  interaction 
with  these  groups  of  ideas,  which  we  may  call  partial  or  elementary 


PERSONALITY  AND  THE  CULTURAL  ORDER       385 

culture  systems,2  that  the  rational  activity  of  the  self  is  mani- 
fested. These  systems  are,  in  turn,  the  creations  of  personal 
activities.  Human  culture  is  the  result  and  the  record  of  personal 
deeds,  no  less  in  science  and  philosophy  than  in  statecraft,  morals, 
war,  industry,  and  religion.  The  great  creative  personalities  of 
history  are  the  supreme  embodiments  of  a  spiritual  self-activity, 
which  every  child  of  civilization,  who  enters  with  maturing  self- 
consciousness  into  his  work,  must  likewise  manifest  in  some  degree. 
However  uncreative  the  mass  of  men  may  seem  to  be,  each  matur- 
ing personality  appropriates  the  materials  of  culture  by  an  indi- 
vidual reaction.  Education  is  the  process  by  which  the  spiritual 
or  cultural  heritage  of  the  race  is  presented  to  the  individual  mind 
and  assimilated  by  that  mind. 

The  culture  system  of  music  or  plastic  art  may  pass  over  many 
an  individual's  head  because  he  is  insensitive  to  aesthetic  values ; 
but  the  systems  of  individual  and  social  morality  and  of  religion 
demand  on  the  part  of  every  member  of  society  some  sort  of  active 
attitude.  Every  man  must  take  some  attitude  towards  the  moral 
obligations  of  his  station,  and,  whether  the  attitude  taken  be 
receptive,  critical  or  hostile,  some  degree  of  self-activity  is  in- 
volved. Thus  the  individual  is  a  unique  center  of  mental  reaction 
in  the  historical  culture-process  of  society.  In  his  affirmations  and 
rejections  of  cultural  types  and  tendencies  in  thought,  feeling,  and 
action,  he  is  either  actualizing  his  own  spiritual  potencies  or  allow- 
ing them  to  perish  of  inanition.  It  is  not  through  the  narrow  and 
circumscribed  limits  and  poverty  of  contents  of  passing  moments 
of  consciousness,  as  revealed  by  introspection  or  retrospection,  that 
we  shall  gain  an  adequate  conception  of  the  nature  of  the  human 
self.  What  such  analysis  reveals  is  frequently  but  the  trivialness, 
the  insignificance,  and  meanness  of  the  introspector's  own  con- 
scious processes.  What  a  human  personality  really  means  to  be, 
and  sometimes  is,  can  be  understood  only  from  an  intelligent  appre- 
ciation of  the  culture  history  of  humanity.  Through  the  wider 
vistas  of  the  comparative  history  of  ethics,  politics,  science,  indus- 
try, the  arts,  philosophy  and  religion,  do  we  first  get  a  significant 
glimpse  of  man's  spiritual  nature  and  powers,  as  revealed  in  the 
ideals,  the  values,  and  deeds  wrought  into  his  civilizations ;  and  as 
unceasingly   actualizing  itself  in  the  movement  of  spiritual  or 

*Cf.  the  treatment  of  this  matter  in  Encken's  Life's  Basis  and  Life's 
Ideal  and  Der  Kampf  um  einen  geistigen  Lebensinhalt. 


386  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

cultural  history.  Culture  is  at  once  the  socialized  creation  of 
mind,  and  the  instrument  for  the  development  of  the  individual 
mind. 

The  life  of  the  human  spirit  is  a  constant  dialectical  process 
of  self-transcendence  of  the  given  or  empirical  selfhood,  the  denial 
of  the  attained  self,  which  is  the  achievement  of  a  larger  and  more 
integrated  selfhood.  The  fuller  and  more  harmonious  spiritual 
life  is  achieved  by  the  individual  only  in  so  far  as  he  forgets  and 
passes  beyond  his  already  attained  state  of  being,  only  in  so  far  as 
he  contemns  and  spurns  his  old  self,  dies  to  his  past,  and  thus  finds 
a  more  rational,  wider,  more  harmonious  selfhood  through  willing 
service  and  sympathetic  participation  in  the  aims  and  interests  of 
that  spiritual  commonwealth  of  selves  whose  realization  is  the  true 
meaning  of  the  whole  movement  of  human  culture. 

The  first  steps  in  this  denial  and  self-transcendence  of  the 
merely  empirical  or  animal  self,  which  is  at  the  same  time  the 
beginning  of  the  spiritual  personality,  are  taken  by  participation 
in  the  historical  institutions  of  society — family,  community,  and 
nation ;  school,  science,  and  philosophy ;  art  and  letters ;  manners, 
morals,  and  religion.  The  forms  and  contents  of  the  cultural  com- 
plexes represented  by  the  above  titles  have  undergone,  and  are  still 
undergoing,  change.  Social  culture  is  subject  to  constant  mutation 
in  some  of  its  factors  and,  at  times,  in  all.  For  example,  the 
influence  of  organized  dogmatic  religion  on  the  average  West- 
European  and  American  has  both  narrowed  in  extent  and  weak- 
ened in  intensity  since  the  close  of  the  Middle  Ages.  Religion  has 
become  much  more  a  matter  of  individual  choice  and  attitude. 
Art  probably  does  not  mean  in  the  life  of  European  people  to-day 
what  it  meant  for  the  Italians  of  the  Renaissance,  and  certainly 
it  plays  to-day  a  very  minor  and  unimportant  role  in  the  life  of  the 
United  States.  There  is  as  yet  but  little  evidence  of  an  awakening 
to  the  cultural  and  moral  significance  of  beauty  amongst  us.  Con- 
trast the  place  of  art  in  American  life  with  the  place  it  occupied 
in  Periclean  Athens  or  in  the  Italy  of  the  Renaissance !  In  science 
and  philosophy  the  sixteenth,  seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries, 
otherwise  prolific  in  great  ideas,  hardly  had  an  inkling  of  the  tre- 
mendously significant  conceptions  of  natural  evolution  and  his- 
torical development,  which  to-day  pervade  all  our  thinking  on 
nearly  every  subject.  In  the  Middle  Ages  virginity  was  esteemed 
a  much  higher  ethical  state  than  marriage.    Contrast  the  Christian 


PERSONALITY  AND  THE  CULTURAL  ORDER       387 

doctrine  of  chastity  with  the  ancient  Greek  ideal  of  continence  or 
moderation!  To  the  Greek  slavery  was  a  natural  institution  not 
questioned.     It  is  unnecessary  further  to  multiply  examples. 

Through  his  stimulation  by,  and  reaction  to,  the  whole  his- 
torical process  of  culture  the  individual  enters  into  the  use  of  the 
common  heritage  of  spiritual  achievement,  and  is  thereby  quick- 
ened to  the  exercise  of  a  rational  freedom  or  self-determination  in 
the  light  of  the  patterns  of  thought  and  action  supplied  by  the  race. 
He  is  challenged  to  find  and  express,  by  his  individual  choices  and 
deeds,  the  rational  meanings  and  values  of  life.  Thus,  by  his  own 
reactions  to  the  cultural  stimuli  and  materials,  the  externally  given 
fact  and  type  of  conduct  and  thought  become  internal  and  vital,  the 
institutional  becomes  personal,  the  dead  past  of  tradition  and 
status  quo  in  custom  and  belief  become  transformed  into  a  living 
present,  instinct  with  meaning  and  interest.  The  world  of  passive 
historical  fact  and  social  institution  becomes  a  spiritual  universe  of 
present  worth. 

The  literature  and  philosophy  of  Greece  are  but  dead  encum- 
brances on  my  mind  unless  I  can  find  in  them  expressions  of  emo- 
tion, attitudes  of  will,  significant  interpretations  of  the  meaning 
of  human  experience  and  destiny,  that  quicken  and  enlarge  my 
own  spiritual  insight  and  shed  light  on  the  problems  of  human  life 
to-day.  The  philosophy  of  a  Descartes  or  a  Kant  are  mere  archaeo- 
logical lumber,  unless  they  have  living  contact  with  and  influence 
upon  the  problems  of  systematic  thought  to-day.  The  principles 
of  social  morality  proclaimed  by  the  Hebrew  prophets  are  fossils 
of  a  dead  and  gone  stratum  of  civilization  unless  they  are  found 
to  bear  pertinently  on  living  issues  of  social  ethics  and  religion. 
The  gospel  of  Jesus  is  a  worthless  survival  unless  it  really  in- 
terprets, elevates,  and  directs  towards  higher  levels,  the  personal 
and  social  aspirations  and  needs  of  the  human  spirit  to-day. 

On  the  other  hand,  through  the  vital  assimilation  of  these 
and  other  historical  achievements  and  revelations  of  the  ongoing 
spiritual  life  of  humanity,  the  life  of  the  present  is  lifted  out 
of  its  narrow  and  parochial  outlook  and  delivered  from  the  blind- 
ness of  action  and  faith,  which  comes  from  seeing  the  present 
only  in  the  light  of  its  own  broken  and  distorted  rays.  The  pres- 
ent can  never  be  understood  in  the  light  of  the  present  alone.  Its 
ills  can  never  be  diagnosed  or  cured  with  the  instruments  which 
itself  alone  supplies.    To  interpret  the  present  aright,  and  to  find 


388  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

the  means  for  its  elevation,  we  must  read  its  problems  and  tasks 
in  the  light  of  the  universal  meanings  and  values  derived  from 
setting  the  present  in  its  relations  to  the  past.  The  personal  life 
is  enlarged  and  inspired  by  entrance,  through  communion  with 
the  past,  into  the  eternal  ongoing  spiritual  life  of  the  race,  in 
which  the  scholastic  distinctions  of  past  and  present  are  overcome. 
A  finer  and  stronger  sense  of  the  value  of  beauty  and  order  comes 
to  us  through  assimilation  of  the  Greek  spirit.  A  deeper  sense 
of  the  moral  foundations  of  society  is  generated  through  assimila- 
tion of  the  prophetic  ideals  of  the  Hebrews.  A  stronger  con- 
viction of  the  permanent  worth  of  the  spirit  in  man  is  aroused  by 
appropriation  of  the  living  content  of  the  Gospel  of  Jesus. 

Into  the  living  present  the  spiritual  past  of  the  race  enters 
as  a  dynamic  and  illuminating  factor.  Past  and  present  are 
fused  into  a  living  and  continuous  whole  of  spiritual  life,  from 
which  issues  the  future.  There  is  a  temporal  continuity,  a  total- 
ity of  intercommunion,  in  the  successive  stages  of  man's  racial- 
spiritual  history  which  strongly  supports  the  hypothesis  of  a  time- 
transcending  spiritual  whole,  a  universal  and  eternal  spiritual 
reality  into  active  relation  with  which  the  finite  individual  and 
the  single  historical  epoch  may  enter,  drawing  from  it  and  con- 
tributing to  it  by  their  own  deeds. 

The  real  personality  of  man  is  not  the  passively  molded 
product  of  historical  forces  and  social  institutions.  Man  can 
affirm  his  free  personality,  by  his  reactions  to  these  forces  and 
institutions.  Every  rationally  conscious  self  is  a  new  and  origi- 
nal center  of  reaction  and  influence  in  the  total  complex  of  social 
culture.  The  acts  of  the  individual  are  the  functioning  of  a  meta- 
historical  principle  in  the  historical  order.  While  the  human  per- 
son, considered  as  an  empirical  center  of  psychical  life,  is  realized 
and  expressed  only  in  dependence  upon  the  social-historical  sys- 
tems of  culture,  these  systems  are  in  turn  the  resultants  of  the 
mental  acts  of  selves  in  society.  They  grow  up,  and  are  shaped 
and  transformed,  through  the  interrelations  of  selves.  These 
social-historical  systems  have  life  and  meaning  only  in  so  far  as 
they  are  assimilated  and  affirmed  by  selves. 

They  are  most  strikingly  modified,  and  sometimes  wholly 
transformed,  by  the  deeds  of  great  historical  personalities.  The 
founder  of  a  new  religion  finds  his  point  of  departure  in  existing 
religious  ideas  and  practices ;  but,  under  his  creative  hand,  these 


PERSONALITY  AND  THE  CULTURAL  ORDER   389 

undergo  metamorphosis,  usually  by  way  of  simplification  and 
addition;  as  in  the  cases  of  Christianity  and  Buddhism.  A 
Copernicus  and  a  Galileo  revolutionize  current  astronomical  con- 
ceptions. Darwin  gives  the  science  of  biology  an  entirely  fresh 
start.  The  changes  wrought  by  creative  genius  are  usually  less 
marked  in  morals,  customs  and  laws ;  here  the  work  of  genius  takes 
effect  more  slowly  but  no  less  certainly.  As  examples  of  the 
transforming  influence  of  the  great  personality,  consider  Confu- 
cius and  Buddha,  Socrates  and  Plato,  Jesus  and  St.  Paul,  Mo- 
hammed and  Luther,  in  the  fields  of  religion  and  morals !  In  art 
and  letters  consider  a  few  that  occur  to  my  mind  at  random, 
Homer,  Sophocles,  Euripides,  Virgil,  Shakespeare,  Raphael, 
Michelangelo,  Goethe !  Whatever  be  the  precise  character  of 
the  influence  exerted  by  the  great  personality  in  the  movement 
of  human  culture,  whether  it  be  mainly  critical  as  in  Protagoras, 
Hume,  and  Voltaire;  reformatory  and  re-creative  as  in  Socrates, 
Plato,  Luther,  Kant,  and  Goethe ;  in  every  case  he  sets  out  by  his 
individual  reaction  to  the  whole  complex  culture  system  of  his 
own  time  or  to  some  element  in  it.  Luther,  for  example,  desired, 
while  attacking  the  Roman  practice  as  to  the  relation  of  faith  and 
morals  to  the  Catholic  Church,  to  leave  mediaeval  theology  for  the 
most  part  undisturbed  and  did  indeed  so  leave  it.  And,  of  course, 
traditional  complexes  creep  back  into  new  movements  and  pro- 
foundly alter  their  character.  Illustrations  in  abundance  will 
occur  to  any  reader  well-informed  in  the  history  of  Christianity. 

The  individual  great  or  small,  significant  or  insignificant,  then 
is  conditioned  in  ideas  and  deeds  by  the  historical  complexes  which 
I  have  called  culture  systems;  and  the  individual  in  some  degree 
adds  to,  takes  away  from,  or  alters,  the  social  heritage  of  culture. 

And  every  mature  human  individual,  great  or  small,  actual- 
izes his  personality  by  assimilating  and  reacting  to  the  complex 
whole  of  culture  systems  which  is  the  very  atmosphere  of  his  own 
life.  This  whole  is  constituted  by  the  more  or  less  harmonious 
blending  of  partial  culture  systems  or  historical  complexes  of 
ideas  in  morals,  religion,  science,  and  politics. 

These  systems  may  sometimes  lie  in  mere  juxtaposition  in 
his  mind,  or  they  may  be  in  partial  antagonism.  For  example, 
the  systems  of  scientific  and  theological  thought,  of  ethical  ideals 
and  business  practice,  by  which  an  individual  is  influenced,  may 
be  antagonistic  to  one  another.  But,  in  any  case,  the  individual 
of  human  culture,  whether  it  be  mainly  critical  as  in  Protogoras, 


390  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

comes  to  his  own  as  a  rational  personality  only  in  so  far  as  he 
assimilates  and  reacts  to  these  systems.  He  attains  rational  self- 
consciousness  and  becomes  an  active  spirit  or  person  by  develop- 
ing conscious  attitudes  towards  the  various  groups  of  commands, 
demands,  and  solicitations,  in  the  midst  of  which  alone  man  can 
awaken  to  the  life  of  reason.  To  take  conscious  attitudes  in  these 
varied  relations  of  the  culture-life  is  to  actualize  one's  spiritual 
selfhood.  The  attitudes  assumed  not  only  vary  from  man  to  man, 
but  in  the  individual  they  may  be  complex  and  varied.  The  in- 
dividual may  wholly  reject  some  of  the  historical  complexes  of 
ideas  presented  to  him  and  wholly  accept  others. 

The  individual  may  wholly  accept  the  scientific  and  wholly 
reject  the  religious  systems  of  ideas  of  his  time  (for  example 
Haeckel  and  in  part  Huxley),  or  he  may  criticize  and  sift  all. 
The  individual  may  be  predominantly  receptive  in  all  directions 
(as  the  average  man  is),  or  critical  (Hume,  Voltaire),  or  reforma- 
tory and  recreative  (Socrates,  Kant,  Goethe).  He  may  be  critical 
in  science  and  merely  receptive  in  religion  and  politics,  or  critical 
in  politics  and  merely  receptive  in  science  and  morals,  etc., 
through  all  the  possible  combinations.  Again,  he  may  with  seem- 
ing passivity  accept  and  assimilate  all  uncritically.  This  the 
mass  of  men  seem  to  do.  But  even  in  the  latter  case,  there  is  in 
the  mature  individual  an  element  of  at  least  partially  conscious 
reaction  in  apprehending  and  assimilating  that  to  which  he  gives 
allegiance.  The  very  process  of  appropriating  into  one's  own 
spirit,  of  making  one's  own,  the  materials  of  culture  is  an  indi- 
vidual reaction.  These  historical  complexes  of  ideas  which  I  have 
called  "culture  systems,"  then,  are  never  wholly  foreign  or  ex- 
trinsic to  the  individual  spirit.  Even  in  the  limiting  case  of  seem- 
ing total  passivity  just  mentioned,  the  actual  self  is  not  a  mere 
creature  of  traditional  and  conventional  tendencies.  And,  indeed, 
the  various  partial  culture  systems  and  the  whole  ethos  of  a  period 
are  vital  and  potent  only  in  so  far  as  they  are  absorbed  and  relived 
in  the  thoughts  and  deeds  of  persons.  Regarded  as  merely  his- 
torical, these  systems  are  but  slumbering  potentialities  of  mental 
development  and  spiritual  influence.  But  when  they  are  taken 
up  into  the  individual  life  and  give  content  and  direction  to  this, 
they  become  present,  over-historical  powers.  The  general  move- 
ment of  spiritual  history  has  a  certain  continuity,  but,  as  it  is 
summed  up,  relived,  and  transformed  in  groups  of  men  and  in 


PERSONALITY  AND  THE  CULTURAL  ORDER       391 

individuals,  it  becomes  discrete,  and  the  reactions  of  each  indi- 
vidual and  group  to  the  culture  environment  constitute  a  series 
of  unique  deeds. 

Moreover,  a  historical  comparison  of  the  growth,  the  rise  and 
modification  and  fall  of  culture  systems,  as  well  as  a  comparison 
of  the  will  attitudes  of  living  individuals  towards  the  various 
culture  systems  which  constitute  a  general  social  situation,  would 
make  it  plain  that,  in  being  assimilated  and  relived,  systems  of 
ideas  are  undergoing  constant,  although  often  minute  and  inap- 
preciable transformations.  Molded  and  modified  as  they  are 
by  the  assimilative  and  recreative  thought  and  will  attitudes  of 
individuals,  these  systems  rise  and  fall,  stagnate  and  grow,  and, 
in  short,  undergo  constant  modification  by  personal  reactions. 
"The  human  beings  who  live,  who  have  lived,  and  who  are  yet  to 
live,  form  in  themselves  one  immense  system,  in  which  the  small- 
est movement  of  each  single  one  is  for  the  most  part  impercep- 
tible, but  yet  affects  by  its  influence  the  general  unceasing  progress. 
History  is  the  relation  of  the  fluctuations  which  occur  on  a  large 
scale,  from  the  dissimilarity  of  the  powers  of  individual  men. 
Our  desire  to  study  history  is  the  longing  to  know  the  law  of  these 
fluctuations,  and  of  the  distribution  of  power  affecting  them." 

On  a  large  scale,  of  course,  it  is  the  creative  historical  person- 
alities— founders  of  religions,  moral  prophets  and  reformers, 
political  innovators,  aesthetic  creators,  scientific  discoverers — 
who  display,  in  the  eyes  of  all  who  have  eyes  to  see,  this  dynamic 
and  recreative  unity  of  individual  life.  The  preeminent  indi- 
vidual is  the  chief  originating  center  in  the  historical  movement 
of  civilization.  Whatever  view  one  may  take  of  the  reciprocal 
relations  between  great  historical  personalities  and  the  masses  of 
their  fellows,  no  progress  can  be  made  towards  understanding  the 
movements  of  past  and  present  society  unless  we  clearly  recognize 
that  concrete  individuals  are  the  creators,  bearers,  transformers 
of  the  whole  process  of  culture.  History  has  being  and  actuality 
only  in  so  far  as  it  is  concentrated  in  the  living  activities  and 
experiences  of  selves.  Hence  so-called  general  tendencies,  social 
movements,  the  social  consciousness,  public  opinion,  the  spirit  of 
the  age,  etc.,  are  actual  and  efficient  only  in  so  far  as  they  are 
incorporated  in  the  beliefs  and  deeds  of  persons. 

The  contention  of  the  present  argument  is  that  what  these 
« H.  Grimm,  Life  of  Michelangelo,  Vol.  I,  p.  62  (Edition  of  1898). 


392  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

great  historical  personalities  do  on  a  large  scale  every  individual 
who  comes  to  maturity  of  life  does  in  some  measure,  and  that 
hence  the  central  nature  of  the  human  person  is  actualized  and 
manifested  in  his  individual  reactions  as  a  member  of  a  historical 
culture.  These  reactions  are  the  affirmations  of  an  ultimate  prin- 
ciple in  the  self.  The  personal  values  which  they  embody  vary 
from  individual  to  individual  and  shift  from  age  to  age.  But  the 
historical  and  the  over-historical  are  fused  in  the  living  person- 
ality. And  if  we  interpret  and  compare  the  evolution  of  human 
attitudes  or  personal  and  social  valuations  according  to  this 
method,  we  shall  arrive  at  the  conception  of  a  cosmic  and  meta- 
historical  system  of  individual  spiritual  centers  which  manifests 
itself  in  the  historical  movement  of  humanity.  For  the  self  is  at 
once  conditioned  by  and  conditions  its  culture-matrix.  In  its 
active,  conditioning  aspect,  it  is  a  hyper-empirical  meta-historical 
unity;  in  its  aspect  as  conditioned  and  dependent,  it  is  empirical 
and  historical.  In  the  former  respect  it  is  timeless,  in  the  latter 
it  develops  in  time;  and  these  two  aspects  stand  in  organic  re- 
lationship in  the  actual  historical  life  of  man.  From  this  stand- 
point, the  active  attitude  or  dynamic  center  of  personality  becomes 
an  ultimate,  a  limit  to  explanation  and  analysis.  The  active  unity 
of  the  socially  and  historically  significant  culture  self  is  a  cumu- 
lative and  creative  center  in  the  spiritual  evolution  of  humanity. 
It  transcends  the  phenomenal  causal  order.  It  cannot  be  dis- 
sected into  elements  or  accounted  for  in  terms  of  a  nexus  whose 
highest  category  is  that  of  the  mechanical  equivalence  of  cause 
and  effect.  There  is  in  the  self  an  irreducible  center  of  unity  not 
residing  in  an  inert  substance,  but  consisting  of  a  principle  of 
actuality  or  rational  spontaneity. 

In  the  actual,  historical  personality,  there  is  an  active  or 
dynamic  unity  which  is  realized  and  manifested  through  the  as- 
similation and  transformation  of  social  culture  systems.  Civiliza- 
tion is  a  spiritual  process  in  which  man  fashions  for  himself  ever 
anew  the  instruments  and  materials  for  the  actualization  of  his 
possibilities  as  person  or  rational  spirit.  And  the  history  of  cul- 
ture is  seen  from  this  standpoint  to  be  the  record  of  man's  shift- 
ing emphasis,  in  self-discovery  and  self-affirmation,  on  the  rela- 
tive values — hedonic,  ethical,  intellectual,  aesthetic,  etc. — of  the 
various  partial  systems  or  groups  of  ideas  which  constitute  the 
spiritual  matrix  for  the  growth  and  movement  of  selfhood. 


PERSONALITY  AND  THE  CULTURAL  ORDER   393 

Kant  made  the  active  synthetizing  unity  of  consciousness, 
Beiuusstsein  ueberhaupt,  the  universal  formal  timeless  principle 
of  knowledge  and  moral  action.  This  Kantian  principle  is  the 
impersonal  function  of  pure  thinking  and  willing,  the  abstract 
and  changeless  principle  of  intellectual  synthesis.  It  is  the  uni- 
versal thinker  which  thinks  in  all  rational  finite  beings.  It  is 
distinct  from  the  empirical  self  or  actual  individual.  We  only 
know  that  it  is,  and  that  without  it  there  could  be  no  knowledge 
of  a  world.  How  it  is  related  to  the  empirical  self  Kant  does  not 
make  clear.  His  disciple  Fichte  made  this  universal  ego  the  only 
reality.  According  to  him,  it  manifests  itself  in  the  infinite  series 
of  finite  egos.  What  is  the  relation  of  our  metaphysical  or  meta- 
historical  principle  of  individuality  to  Kant's  doctrine  ?  I  hold 
that,  while  individual  minds  have  a  common  structure,  and  a 
common  or  universal  principle  of  rational  and  spiritual  func- 
tioning, and  thus  exhibit  an  identical  nature,  this  nature  is  not 
existentially  identical  in  all  minds,  We  may  say  that  the  prin- 
ciple is  repeated  in  each;  but  each  individual  is,  as  an  existence, 
distinct  and  unique.  The  individual  is  real  and  his  relationships 
to  the  totality  of  the  real  are  those  of  a  unique  center  who  is 
able,  as  thinking  and  feeling  being,  to  enter  into  a  manifold 
variety  of  connections  with  other  selves.  The  unity  of  the  self  is 
that  of  a  uniquely  personal  will.  The  self  has  a  history  and  is 
subject  to  development  from  unconscious  latency  to  conscious 
actuality.  The  empirical  person  results  from  the  interaction  of 
the  synthetic  creative  principle,  which  is  the  root  of  individuality, 
with  biological  and  cultural  stimuli  and  materials.  The  active 
unifier  is  at  first  known  as  a  dim  and  fluctuating  self-feeling 
present  in  impulse  and  desire.  The  organization  of  this  chaotic 
feeling  self  into  a  harmonious  individuality  can  take  place  only 
through  the  concomitant  organization  of  its  experience  in  the  vital 
interactions  with  nature  and  culture.  The  natural  or  biological 
ego  must  struggle  and  suffer,  it  must  deny  itself  and  go  out  into 
the  world  of  external  nature  and  culture  in  order  that  it  may 
come  home  to  itself  as  a  rational  unity,  an  integrated  whole  of 
feeling  and  insight,  of  will  and  thought.  The  organization  of  a 
significant  and  coherent  world  of  nature,  and  a  world  of  social 
order — morality,  art,  religion  and  philosophy — is  at  the  same  time 
the  development  of  selves  into  self-directing  harmony  and  totality 
of  life.     Thus  selves  come  to  know  themselves  and  to  realize  their 


394  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

spiritual  powers  as  unique  centers  in  which  the  meanings  of  the 
realm  of  nature  and  the  cultural  values  of  social  history  are  being 
actualized  and  enjoyed.  This  process  of  the  actualization  of  mean- 
ings and  values  through  and  in  the  lives  of  selfhood  is  one  that, 
so  far  as  we  can  see,  is  unceasing  and  incomplete  as  a  world 
process  and  yet  is  forever  being  fulfilled  as  the  generations  come 
and  go. 

The  unity  of  the  self  is  thus  a  central  factor  in  the  organiza- 
tion of  experience  into  a  cosmos.  The  implicit  unity  of  the  self 
becomes  distinctly  known  and  effective  only  in  vital  relation  to 
and  dependence  on  the  world.  On  the  other  hand,  it  is  through 
constant  activity  of  selves  that  the  world  of  experience  is  organ- 
ized and  grows  in  meanings  and  values;  the  only  vital  unity-in- 
difference, the  only  dynamic  center  of  cultural  and  cosmical  re- 
lationships and  values  that  we  can  conceive  is  that  which  functions 
in  persons.  The  world  of  our  common  or  rational  experience  and 
thinking,  the  realm  of  nature  which  exists  for  us  as  knowers  and 
doers  only  by  virtue  of  our  cooperation  in  the  social-historical  life 
of  humanity,  is  a  realm  of  potential  personality;  the  self  is  the 
world  discovering  and  affirming  its  own  meaning — the  cosmos 
attaining  to  self-consciousness.  Thus  selfhood  or  personality  dis- 
covers the  meaning  of  the  cosmical  process;  and  the  only  con- 
ceivable cosmos  is  one  implicated  in,  and  known  through,  the 
organizing  and  interpreting  activities  of  selves. 


CHAPTER  XXIX 


PERSONALITY    AND    VALUES1 


Thus  far,  in  our  treatment  of  personality,  we  have  considered 
it  chiefly  from  the  standpoint  of  philosophical  psychology — in 
fine,  as  the  individuated  center  of  experience  and  the  focus  of 
social  relationships.  We  have  now  to  consider  the  self  as  source 
and  center  of  reference  for  values.  The  most  persistent  and  cen- 
tral characteristic  of  the  self  is  the  fact  that  it  evaluates,  appre- 
ciates, and  hence  exercises  selective  preference  among  its  possible 
ends  and  possessions.  The  root  of  valuation  is  feeling  or  interest. 
A  colorless  knower  would  not  individuate  his  objects,  but  a  con- 
scious individual  always  individuates  and  thus  selects  and  values 
objects  in  terms  of  interest  or  feeling.  All  human  valuation,  then, 
is  due  to  the  fact  that  the  self  is  a  feeling  center.  The  philos- 
opher, no  less  than  the  lover  or  gourmand,  selects  and  rejects  his 
objects  of  interest  and  enjoyment  in  terms  of  himself  as  the 
central  mass  of  feeling  reacting  to  these  objects.  Because  we  feel 
we  exercise  selective  preferences  and  arrange  the  activities,  enjoy- 
ments and  relationships  which  are  actual  or  possible  for  us,  on 
a  scale  of  values.2 


1  This  chapter  is  the  expansion  of  an  article  on  ' '  Personality  and  a 
Metaphysics  of  Value"  in  The  International  Journal  of  Ethics,  Vol.  xxi, 
October,  1910,  pp.  23-36. 

2  The  question  has  been  discussed  (by  Ehrenfels,  Meinong,  Urban  and 
others)  whether  the  psychological  process  of  valuation  is  identical  with  desire 
(Ehrenfels),  or  the  sense  of  value  is  given  in  feelings  of  value  (Wertgefiihle) 
that  follow  on  judgments  involving  the  recognition  of  the  existence  or  non- 
existence of  objects  (Meinong).  This  is  a  psychological  question  which  does 
not  directly  concern  us  here.  It  seems  to  me  that  desire  implies  value  and  that 
we  may  desire  and  value  that  which  we  recognize  to  be  nonexistent.  I  may, 
for  instance,  desire  and  value  for  myself  a  life  in  which  I  should  have  ample 
leisure  to  read  and  write  poetry.  I  cannot  conceive  myself  valuing  anything 
and  not  desiring  it.  In  view,  however,  of  the  ambiguities  in  the  use  of  the 
term  ' '  desire, ' '  it  would  be  better,  perhaps,  to  say  that  valuation  springs  from 
interest.  If  one  has  no  interest  in  a  thing,  one  does  not  value  it,  and  vice 
versa.  One  can  be  interested  in  things  that  do  not  exist,  provided  one  has 
desire  for  such  things. 

395 


396  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

We  may  distinguish  between  the  incipient  feelings  of  value  and 
the  explicit  judgment  of  value.     Any  agreeable  feeling  has  posi- 
tive value,  since  it  satisfies  some  interest  of  the  self;  but  an  ex- 
plicit judgment  of  value  is  the  reflective  assertion  that  the  interest 
in  question  is  satisfied.     Logically,   a  judgment  of  value  is  of 
the  same  order  as  a  judgment  of  existence.     To  say  "this  is  good, 
noble,  beautiful"  is  a  judgment  in  the  same  sense  as  to  say  "it  is 
true,  real,  cold  or  red."     In  judgments  of  value  a  universal  or 
meaning  is  predicated  of  a  subject.     In  both  judgments  of  exist- 
ence and  of  value  the  subject  is  either  a  concrete  experience  or  an 
intellectual  construction  therefrom.     The  same  subjects  may  be 
qualified  by  both  types  of  judgment.     For  example,  "this  is  a 
landscape  and  a  beautiful  one."     The  one  important  difference 
between  judgments  of  value  and  all  other  types  of  judgment  is 
this — all  judgments  of  value  affirm  (or  affirm  by  denying)  that 
objects  have  agreeable  or  disagreeable,  satisfying  or  dissatisfying, 
qualities-in-relation-to-selves,  whereas  judgments  of  existence,  that 
is,  all  purely  cognized  qualities  and  relationships,  may  make  as- 
sertions concerning  real  existence  considered  apart  from  any  indi- 
vidual self.     Valuation  is  thus  always  a  subject-object  relation 
and,  thus  far,  is  like  cognition.     But,  whereas  in  pure  cognition 
the  object  cognized  is  assumed  to  possess  as  such  the  cognized 
qualities  and  relations  independently  of  the  subject,  there  would 
be  no  meaning  whatsoever  in  saying  that  an  object  had  value 
apart  from  a  subject.     If  there  be  objective  character  in  values, 
it  cannot  be  an  objectivity  that  is  real  apart  from  all  subjects. 
There  is  no  "beautiful,"  there  is  no  "good,"  but  thinking  makes 
it  so.     On  the  other  hand,  if  there  are  electrons,  there  are  elec- 
trons, whether  we  think  so  or  not.     Of  course,  theoretical  judg- 
ments have  various  degrees  and  kinds  of  practical  value.    That  is 
another  question.     The  values  that  such  judgments  have  are  due 
to  the  interest  of  selves  in  them.    Psychologically,  many  cognitive 
judgments  are  made  because  of  some  sort  of  interest.     Others  are 
made  involuntarily  or  perforce. 

Practical  or  value  judgments  are  of  two  sorts  of  values:  in- 
strumental or  mediate  values,  the  values  possessed  by  things  and 
events  as  means  for  the  attainments  of  ends  beyond  themselves; 
intrinsic  or  immediate  values,  the  values  which  things  and  rela- 
tionships have  as  ends-in-themselves,  as  immediately  satisfying 
to  persons.     Here   we   are   concerned   primarily   with   intrinsic 


PERSONALITY  AND  VALUES  397 

values.     But  the  distinction  between  instrumental  and  intrinsic 
values  is  by  no  means  a  hard  and  fast  one.     The  means  and  the 
end  cannot  be  separated.     The  end  justifies  the  means,  provided 
the  means  to  the  given  end  do  not  defeat  another  equally  worthy 
end.     An  end  worthy  in  itself  may  be  nullified  by  the  means 
taken  for  its  accomplishment ;  for  example,  if,  in  order  to  support 
his  family,  a  man  sacrifices  his  integrity.     An  end  not  of  high 
worth  in  itself  may  become  ennobled  by  the  means ;  for  example, 
the  selfless  devotion  of  love  and  loyalty  are  noble  things  even 
though  the  objects  be  unworthy  of  the  service  dedicated  to  them. 
Economic  values  are  purely  exchange  values,  purely  instru- 
mental.   But,  if  we  look  upon  economic  activities  from  the  stand- 
point of  human  well-being,  then  the  center  of  emphasis  shifts  and 
economic  values  cease  to  become  merely  exchange  values.     Eco- 
nomic wealth   is  viewed  from  the   standpoint   of  consumption.3 
The  gaining  of  a  livelihood  may  be  carried  on  in  a  worthy  or  a 
degrading  fashion.     Earning  one's  living  should  be  both  a  con- 
tribution to  the  service  of  others  and  a  means  of  realizing  one's 
own  personality.     That  it  is  so  often  not  is  due  to  the  prevalent 
materialism  of  western  civilization — a  materialism  that  is  very 
patent  to  oriental  thinkers.     Thus  economic  activity  should  have 
both    instrumental    and    intrinsic    values.      Bodily    health    and 
strength  are,  from  the  spiritual  standpoint,  instrumental  values; 
but  do  they  not  constitute,  in  part,  intrinsic  values,  in  so  far  as 
they  may  conduce  to  the  happiness  and  beauty  of  their  posses- 
sor, enable  him  to  have  time  and  energy  and  zest  for  social  service 
and  the  cultivation  of  letters,  the  arts  or  sciences  1     ^Esthetic 
values  are  both  instrumental  and  intrinsic.    Plastic  art  and  music 
refresh  and  stimulate  the  mind  of  the  thinker  and  at  the  same 
time  have  value  in  themselves.     Scholarship,   scientific   investi- 
gation, creative  work  in  arts  and  letters,  even  teaching,  are  both 
instrumental  and  intrinsic  in  value. 

I  think  that,  in  any  society  or  individual,  the  separation  of 
instrumental  and  intrinsic  values  is  a  mark  of  defect,  of  failure. 
Nothing  more  clearly  evidences  the  failure  of  western  civilization 
than  the  great  gap  which  separates  the  industrialist  and  com- 
mercialist  (whether  employer  or  employee),  and  the  ruler,  from 
intelligent  and  spiritual  participation  in  the  values  of  art,  letters, 

•See,  fox  example,  J.  A.  Hobson's  Work  and  Wealth. 


398  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

science  and  learning  and  even  religion.  Spiritually  our  civiliza- 
tion is  maimed,  halt  and  blind. 

A  classification  and  survey  of  values  is  an  important  part  of 
systematic  philosophy,  only  in  so  far  as  thereby  we  may  be  able 
to  set  in  a  clearer  and  fuller  light  the  dynamic  idealizing  and 
purposive  tendencies  and  functions  of  selves  or  persons  A  meta- 
physics of  values  can  only  be  regarded  as  a  special  way  of  formu- 
lating a  metaphysics  of  persons. 

With  this  principle  in  mind  I  offer  here,  in  outline,  a  tentative 
classification  of  the  most  significant  and  important  human  valua- 
tions. The  list  is  not  exhaustive,  and  I  do  not  claim  for  the  classi- 
fication either  logical  completeness  or  inherent  necessity.  I  do 
not  know  how  one  could  proceed  to  satisfy  either  of  these  claims. 
I  found  my  guiding  principles  simply  by  examining  the  empirical 
character  and  relations  of  personality.  The  classification  is  made 
as  a  means  of  getting  forward  with  the  main  contention  that  the 
metaphysics  of  values  must  be,  in  effect,  a  metaphysics  of  persons, 
and  that  the  final  reality  and  supremacy  of  values  in  the  world- 
order  stands  or  falls  with  the  reality  and  persistence  of  persons  in 
this  world-order.  I  hold  that  a  person  is,  by  the  nature  of  the 
case,  a  more  real  reality,  if  the  phrase  be  permissible,  than  even 
the  most  "over-individual"  and  "ineffable"  value. 

The  three  fundamental  relations  in  which  the  human  person 
stands,  takes  preferential  attitudes,  and  has  typical  experiences, 
are  to  nature,  fellowman,  and  God  or  the  supreme  reality  and 
unity,  however  this  may  be  conceived.  The  classification  of  in- 
trinsic valuing  attitudes  may  then  be  determined  with  reference 
to  these  three  types  of  relationship.  And,  in  and  for  the  valu- 
ing person,  there  are  three  main  types  of  valuing  attitudes.  These 
are:  (1)  theoretical  or  truth-attitudes;  (2)  practical  or  overt- 
action  attitudes;  (3)  immediate  emotional  or  feeling-attitudes. 
Each  one  of  these  types  of  valuing  attitudes  may  be  differentiated 
in  each  one  of  the  three  fundamental  relationships  of  the  experi- 
encing and  attitude-taking  self.  Further,  in  each  group  there  will 
be  a  differentiation  of  values  uncontrolled  by  any  single  nu- 
merical principle.  And,  since  persons  do  not  live  and  function  as 
machines  or  series  of  compartments,  there  are  complex  cross- 
valuations.  Of  these  a  complete  enumeration  is  not  necessary, 
or,  perhaps,  even  possible. 

In  the  truth-value  attitudes,  which  have  to  do  with  the  ac- 


PERSONALITY  AND   VALUES  399 

ceptance  and  interpretation  of  f  act-in-relation,  we  get :  ( 1 )  The 
reality  of  nature  in  its  separate  elements  and  in  their  connections 
as  parts  of  a  whole.  In  knowing  the  physical  world  we  accept  it 
as  it  is,  independent  of  our  feelings  and  desires,  and  we  find 
worth  in  interpreting  it  and  submitting  our  minds  to  its  leading, 
as  thus  accepted  in  all  the  variety  of  its  elemental  features  and 
their  connections.  Thus  we  get  and  value  natural  science,  as  a 
systematic  account  of  the  given  world-order.  (2)  The  reality  of 
our  fellowmen.  We  find  an  intrinsic  worth  in  knowing  the  actual 
character  of  human  nature  as  expressed  in  its  deeds  and  utter- 
ances in  the  living  present  and  in  the  historical  past.  A  system- 
atic and  growing  knowledge  of  human  nature  in  all  the  variety 
and  interrelatedness  of  its  elements  constitutes  the  psychological, 
social,  and  historical  sciences.  (3)  The  reality  of  God,  the  Su- 
preme Unity  of  the  real.  We  find  a  worth  in  knowing  God  and 
our  relations  with  him,  and  this  knowledge,  if  there  be  such,  con- 
stitutes theology  and  part  of  metaphysics.  I  am  not,  of  course, 
here  attempting  to  discuss  the  question  whether  there  be  a  God 
or  supreme  unity,  and  whether  there  be  any  science  of  systematic 
theology.  It  is  sufficient  for  my  present  purpose  that  a  consid- 
erable number  of  intelligent  persons  hold  that  there  is  a  real  and 
knowable  God  and  value  the  reality  and  knowableness  of  God. 
For  such  persons  the  being  of  God  and  the  science  which  deals 
therewith  have  fact  and  truth  values.  And  I  think  that  these 
values  are  not  the  immediate  emotional  values  of  religion.  A 
man  may  take  keen  interest  and  satisfaction  in  theological  inquiry 
without  having  very  much  personal  religious  experience.  Such, 
then,  are  the  chief  types  of  theoretical  valuation. 

The  practical  value-attitudes  refer  to  the  chief  types  of  overt 
action.  The  respective  objects  of  these  valuations  may  be  valued 
mediately,  because  they  are  means  to  the  conservation  and  en- 
hancement of  other  values,  or  they  may,  in  some  cases,  come  to 
be  valued  immediately,  or  on  their  own  account.  Normally,  they 
are  usually  mediate  values  which  tend  to  run  into  or  be  fused 
with  the  immediate  emotional  and  theoretical  values  which  they 
facilitate.  The  chief  types  are:  (1)  Technology,  which  com- 
prises all  the  methods  and  instruments  for  the  adjustment  of 
human  life  to  the  order  of  nature,  and  the  control  of  this  order 
for  the  conservation  and  enhancement  of  human  well-being. 
These  technological  instruments  comprise  all  the  applied  arts  from 


400  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

engineering  and  everyday  physical  labor  to  medicine  and  hygiene. 
(2)  The  instrumentalities  of  social  order  and  well-being.  These 
are  the  methods  and  instruments  for  the  regulation  of  our  social 
relationships.  They  include  all  social  customs  and  civil,  political, 
and  economic  laws  and  arrangements,  including  the  work  of  ad- 
ministration and  teaching.  In  short,  the  whole  machinery  of  our 
social  life,  when  considered  as  machinery  or  instrumentality,  falls 
under  this  head.  (3)  The  methods  and  instruments  for  entering 
into  right  relationships  with  God.  These  comprise  all  forms  of 
worship,  prayer,  meditation,  and  conduct,  which  may  be  regarded 
as  practical  means  for  gaining  access  to  the  supreme  object  of 
religion  and  for  communion  with  Him. 

Finally,  there  are  the  immediate  emotional  value-attitudes. 
These  valuations  never  subserve  any  more  remote  ends.  They  are 
regarded  as  wholly  self-sufficing ;  and  other  values,  both  theoretical 
and  practical,  are  made  subservient  and  instrumental  to  these. 
The  chief  types  are :  ( 1 )  The  emotional  values  of  nature,  namely, 
the  feelings  of  beauty,  picturesqueness,  grandeur,  and  sublimity 
aroused  by  contemplation  of  nature.  The  aesthetic  values  of  nature 
represent  to  the  feeling  soul,  which  contemplates  the  harmoniously 
beautiful  landscape,  the  picturesque  waterfall,  or  the  sublime 
range  of  snow-clad  mountain  peaks,  a  living  harmony  or  unity 
of  the  manifold,  a  majesty  of  power  or  form,  self-complete  and 
self-sufficient.  Similarly,  the  reproductions  of  nature  in  art  and 
literature  enhance  these  feelings  by  limitation  and  selection,  by 
the  exclusion  of  all  discordant  elements  and  of  all  features  sug- 
gestive of  natural  incompleteness  or  lack  of  harmony  and  balance. 
(2)  The  emotional  values  of  human  fellowship  or  social  life. 
Such  are  the  feelings  of  companionship,  comradeship,  friendship, 
tender  emotion,  and  love.  These  emotions,  and  others  akin  to 
them,  are  distinctively  interpersonal  emotional  values.  They  run 
from  the  wider  and  vaguer  sentiments  of  humanity  to  the  nar- 
rower and  more  intense  sentiments  of  the  family  and  romantic 
sexual  love.  Their  antitheses  are  the  negative  social  feelings,  the 
anti-social  social  emotions  one  might  call  them,  since  they,  too, 
depend  on  interpersonal  relationships.  I  mean  such  emotions  as 
hostility,  distrust,  hatred.  Every  principal  feeling,  doubtless, 
has  its  antithesis,  and  there  is  a  negative  aspect  to  every  form  of 
valuation;  but  we  are  now  concerned  with  the  primary  and  posi- 
tive aspects  of  valuation.     The  sum  or,  rather,  the  organic  unity 


PERSONALITY  AND   VALUES  401 

of  the  emotional  values  of  interpersonal  relationship  might  be 
called  the  ethical  emotional  value-attitude  of  personality.  This 
would  constitute  the  entire  disposition  of  the  person  toward  other 
persons.  It  is  doubtful  whether  there  is,  in  all  persons,  such  an 
ethical  unity  of  disposition,  since  in  many  individuals  personality 
is  very  imperfectly  achieved.  The  generally  recognized  moral 
values,  such  as  truthfulness,  justice,  and  honesty,  are  conceptual 
generalizations  and  incipient  plans  of  action  in  relation  to  other 
persons,  which  have  their  root  and  origin  in  the  ethical  emotional 
dispositions  of  persons.  Ethical  dispositions  have  a  conceptual 
or  thought  aspect,  but,  primarily,  in  their  immediacy,  they  are 
emotional  dispositions  or  tendencies  to  act.  The  degree  of  unity 
and  harmony  in  the  ethical  disposition  is  expressed  in  the  degree 
of  unity  which  obtains  in  the  interpersonal  dispositions  or  senti- 
ments. 

Here,  too,  belong  the  aesthetic  values  of  social  and  cultural  life. 
In  art  and  literature  the  emotions  and  deeds  of  individuals,  the 
clashing  and  reconciliation  of  wills  in  society  with  one  another 
and  with  nature  and  fate,  are  presented  to  the  beholder  in  ideally 
self-complete  unities  of  feeling  and  action.  Art  and  literature  pro- 
duce elevation,  harmony,  and  repose  of  feeling  in  regard  to  human 
deeds  and  destinies,  by  lifting  them  out  of  the  actual,  by  isolating 
them  in  a  designed  unity,  and  thus  eliminating  the  incomplete- 
ness, the  reference  beyond  themselves,  and  the  discords,  of  the 
romantic  and  tragic  episodes  of  actual  life. 

(3)  Religious  emotional  values.  Communion  or  felt  personal 
relationship  with  God  would  seem  to  be  the  final  goal  of  all  re- 
ligious thought  and  practice.  Worship,  prayer,  meditation,  are 
instruments  or  means  toward  the  end  of  fellowship  or  communion 
with  God.  Inasmuch  as  the  final  object  of  religious  value  is  taken 
to  be  the  Supreme  Reality  and  Ultimate  Lenity,  religious  experi- 
ence promises  to  afford  the  most  self-complete,  comprehensive,  and 
satisfying  type  of  emotional  value.  It  is  not  surprising  that  re- 
ligious devotees  have  found  in  it  that  type  of  value-experience  in 
which  all  other  intrinsic  human  valuations  find  their  union  and 
consummation.  Art  performs  a  similar  service  for  religious  emo- 
tional valuations  and  for  social  emotional  valuations.  Art  lifts 
religious  emotions  out  of  the  imperfect  actuality  and  sets  them 
forth  in  their  own  harmonious  unity,  self-sufficiency,  and  self- 
completeness. 


402  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

I  have  not  given  a  special  place  in  this  classification  to  aes- 
thetic values,  for  the  reason  that  these  values  do  not  seem  to  me 
to  constitute  a  single  unified  type.  The  aesthetic  values  are  com- 
plex and  varied,  according  to  their  reference  to  nature,  or  fellow- 
man,  or  God.  All  art  is  an  instrument  of  social  expression  of 
emotions  and  sentiments.  In  art  we  find,  besides  the  reproduction 
of  the  aesthetic  feelings  engendered  by  the  contemplation  of  na- 
ture, the  expression,  with  a  freedom,  harmony,  and  self-complete- 
ness, which  is  lacking  in  actual  life,  of  the  interpersonal  emotions 
of  social  life.  Creative  art,  in  so  far  as  it  deals  with  human 
themes,  lends  an  ideal  grace  to  life,  and  the  life  is  the  life  of 
men  in  its  social  and  cultural  aspects. 

The  above  classification  of  values  involves,  as  do  all  such  classi- 
fications, the  sundering  of  things  that  in  actual  experience  are 
found  together.  For  example,  social  and  religious  values  inter- 
penetrate. ^Esthetic  values  are  found  in  close  association  with 
both  social  and  religious  emotions  and  sentiments.  Ethical  and 
religious  values  are  found  fused  together.  In  the  practical  values 
control  of  nature  and  social  control  constantly  intermingle.  In 
the  theoretical  values  natural  science  and  humanistic  science  in- 
fluence one  another's  methods  and  conceptions,  and  both  influence 
theology  and  religious  metaphysics.  The  manifold  interdepend- 
ences of  nature  and  human  society  are  reflected  in  the  interpene- 
trations  of  human  values;  and,  if  the  values  of  religion  and 
theology  are  to  be  taken  as  real  and  intrinsic  values,  these  values, 
by  the  very  character  of  their  objects  and  their  modes  of  expres- 
sion, must  interpenetrate  with  the  values  of  the  natural  order  and 
of  human  fellowship. 

What,  in  general,  are  the  relations  between  the  theoretical, 
practical,  and  emotional  values  ? 

The  practical  value-attitudes  are  normally  instrumental.  They 
are  means  to  ends.  The  normal  relation  between  the  practical 
and  the  theoretical  values  is  that  of  instruments  to  the  determin- 
ing conditions  of  their  fashioning  and  operation.  The  successful 
outcome  of  the  activities  represented  by  the  values  of  technology, 
law,  politics,  custom,  and  morality,  depend  on  their  conformity 
with  reality,  or,  in  other  words,  with  the  orders  of  existence  rep- 
resented by  the  theoretical  or  truth-values.  Truth  of  fact  and 
truth  of  law  in  science  are  means  to  practical  ends  only  in  the 


PERSONALITY  AND   VALUES  403 

sense  that  they  dictate  the  conditions  for  the  realization  of  the 
practical  and  emotional  values  of  action. 

In  the  case  of  the  religious  values,  the  success  of  the  modes 
of  action  represented  by  worship,  prayer,  and  meditation,  de- 
pends upon  the  assumed  conformity  of  these  actions  with  the 
ultimate  reality  of  God.  A  man  may,  indeed,  believe  in  a  cer- 
tain kind  of  God  because  he  wants  or  wills  so  to  believe.  To 
worship  the  God  whom  one  craves,  and  to  feel  oneself  in  com- 
munion with  him,  may  be  the  most  profoundly  satisfying  ex- 
perience of  value  that  a  finite  mind  can  have ;  but  the  continuance 
and  meaningfulness  of  this  value  is  possible  only  if  the  God  is 
held  to  be  a  reality,  not  a  product  of  the  worshiper's  wishes. 

The  general  goal  of  the  activities  initiated  by  the  practical 
value-attitudes  is  the  enlargement,  enrichment,  and  harmonization 
of  the  immediate  emotional  values  of  personality.  Inasmuch  as 
truth-values  represent  the  determining  conditions  for  such  emo- 
tional or  feeling  fulfillment,  we  may  say  that  the  ultimate  intrinsic 
values  for  personal  deed  and  experience  are  the  reactions  of  per- 
sonal feeling,  in  which  the  truth  or  knowledge  which  we  accept 
or  discover,  and  the  overt  activities  in  which  we  engage,  whether 
with  reference  to  nature,  fellowmen,  or  God,  bear  their  fruits  in 
a  richer,  more  harmonious,  and  continuing  feeling-experience. 
The  final  intrinsic  values  of  life  are  the  personally  possessed 
unities  of  truth  and  feeling. 

If  this  view  seems  to  reduce  truth  and  reality,  which  is  the 
object  of  truth's  reference,  to  the  position  of  mere  handmaids  of 
emotion,  it  is  to  be  borne  in  mind,  on  the  other  hand,  that  the 
emotional  values  of  experience  are  progressively  realized  and 
conserved  only  in  so  far  as  they  are  the  fruits  of  practices  in 
harmony  with  the  real  constitution  and  course  of  the  universe. 
Emotional  experience  or  feeling,  to  be  permanently  and  fully 
satisfying,  must  conform  to  the  truth  of  things.  If  there  were 
no  real  and  determinate  nature  of  things,  independent  of  our 
transient  feelings  and  wishes,  there  would  be  no  reason  why  any 
desire  or  wish,  or  any  number  of  incompatible  desires  might  not 
all  be  fully  satisfied  ad  libitum.  If  beggars  could  be  choosers, 
we  might  all  ride  in  automobiles.  A  false  science  of  nature  will 
not  yield  permanently  good  results  in  its  practical  applications. 
Laws  and  moral  injunctions  will  be  in  vain  unless  they  are  in 
harmony  with  the  actual  constitution  of  human  nature  which, 


404  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 


m 


turn,  may  be  revealed  in  very  significant  aspects  by  social  cus- 
toms law,  and  morality.  Even  friendship  and  love  must  take 
account  of  the  actual  individuality  of  friends  and  lovers,  if  these 
values  would  endure. 

The  immediate  emotional  values  of  experience  then  are  not 
independent  of  the  truth  and  reality  values.  The  latter  values 
yield  their  appropriate  emotional  satisfactions,  and  the  former 
values,  in  turn,  are  sustained  and  illuminated  by  the  truth  values. 
Since  the  immediate  unity  of  the  personality  is  a  unity  of  feeling, 
the  acts  and  the  truth-attitudes  which  yield  the  personal  values 
of  experience  do  so  by  being  appropriated  into  and  fused  with  the 
personal  self-feeling.  No  purely  emotional  value  is  self-sustaining 
and  no  intellectual  or  theoretical  value  is  without  emotional  color- 
ing. In  their  immediate  reality  for  the  person,  all  intrinsic 
values  involve  the  union,  with  varying  emphasis,  of  truth  and 
feeling,  or  intellection  and  emotion. 

In  this  work  of  classification  we  have  been  dealing  in  abstrac- 
tions. If  we  ask  what  is  the  ultimate  principle  for  the  unification 
of  values,  and  what  is  the  final  sustaining  ground  of  values,  I 
think  we  must  answer,  to  both  questions,  personality ! 

Valuations,  as  incentives  to  and  appraisals  of  actions,  are 
simply  attitudes  of  persons,  affirmations  which  enhance  and  ap- 
praise experiences.  Anything  consciously  desired  and  purposively 
sought  is  thus  desired  and  sought  because  it  represents  some 
worth  for  a  person  either  in  private  or  social  relations.  I  have 
not,  in  my  classification,  included  a  separate  set  of  "personal 
values,"  because  it  seems  to  me  that,  in  the  last  analysis,  all  values 
are  personal  facts  and  attitudes.  And  the  distinction,  so  fre- 
quently drawn,  between  individual  and  overindividual  values,  is 
simply  a  distinction  in  universality,  rationality,  and  compre- 
hensiveness, of  content  and  scope,  within  the  scale  of  personal 
values.  A  person  is  a  more  or  less  socialized  and  universalized 
individual,  and,  as  such,  may  be  described  in  terms  of  his  valua- 
tions. These  are  measures  of  his  degree  of  personalization.  The 
choice  of  ends  by  a  more  or  less  rational  agent  depends  on  a 
series  of  judgments  of  value  or  worth.  Theoretical,  no  less  than 
practical,  activities  are  guided  by  the  affirmation  of  a  series  or 
scale  of  life-values.  The  history  of  a  man's  valuations  tells  the 
story  of  his  judgments  on  life  and  of  his  attitudes  in  relation  to 
its  varied  experiences.     In  typical  and  contrasting  forms  of  cul- 


PERSONALITY  AND   VALUES  405 

ture,  such  as  those  of  China  and  Europe,  we  find  broadly  defined 
and  differing  standards  of  value  in  regard  to  science,  social  life, 
art,  religion,  etc.  The  history  of  the  mutations  of  culture  can 
be  compactly  expressed  in  terms  of  the  evolution  of  valuations. 
This  would  give  us  a  sublimated  KulturgeschicMe. 

On  the  other  hand,  considered  as  immediate  and  effective 
realities,  values  are  valuations,  that  is,  affirmations  and  attitudes 
which  exist  and  function  only  in  personal  centers  of  experience 
and  deed.  No  formal  logical  and  metaphysical  principle  for 
the  final  unification  and  cosmical  grounding  of  values  can  be  found 
outside  the  unity  of  personal  attitude  and  experience.  In  the 
lives  of  finite  persons  there  are  two  complementary  and  mutually 
indispensable  features :  diversity  or  wealth  of  content,  and  internal 
harmony  of  experience.  There  are,  in  actual  developing  persons, 
all  grades  of  relationship  between  the  diversity  and  the  harmony 
of  experiences,  but  in  a  sane  self  neither  can  be  wholly  absent. 
The  growth  of  unity  in  diversity  in  the  self  can  be  expressed  in 
terms  of  the  organization  of  values  in  increasing  harmony.  The 
so-called  overindividual  values  are  representative  of  the  more 
universal  and  rational  intrapersonal  and  interpersonal  attitudes. 
The  "normative"  or  "ideal"  values  of  truth-seeking  and  truth- 
knowing,  sympathy,  justice,  love,  beauty,  holiness  and  fellowship 
with  God,  are  generalized  expressions  of  fundamental  attitudes 
and  contents  of  spiritual  and  rational  selves.  Spiritual  selfhood 
or  personality  is  actualized  precisely  through  the  affirmation  and 
service,  in  concrete  situations,  of  these  universal  standards  or 
norms.  In  this  sense,  our  definitions  of  ideal  values  and  of  the 
spiritual  and  rational  self,  are  and  must  be  circular.  The  person 
is  the  rational  unity  of  conscious  life,  in  and  for  which  values 
are  realized ;  and  the  person  develops  in  and  through  the  univer- 
salizing value-attitudes. 

The  so-called  "absolute"  values  or  overindividual  types  of 
valuation  can  be  nothing  other  than  generalized  formulations  of 
the  ways  in  which  persons  actually  attain  self-fulfillment  through 
the  progressive  harmonization  and  universalization  of  their 
actions  and  experiences.  Since  there  are  overindividual  types  of 
intrinsic  valuation,  this  means  that  persons  are  conscious  indi- 
viduals whose  vocation  it  is  to  unify  and  rationalize  their  lives 
by  finding  and  affirming  certain  universal  interests  and  ends 
which   belong  to  their   deepest   and  truest   selfhood.      In   other 


406  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

words,  it  means  that  the  development  of  personality  takes  place 
through  the  effective  working,  in  separate  individuals,  of  certain 
common  or  universal  potencies  of  reason  and  spirit. 

Some  philosophers  would  confine  philosophy  to  the  analysis  and 
description  of  values  as  actual  functions  and  processes  in  experi- 
ence, and  would  drop  all  questions  which  might  arise  in  regard  to 
a  metaphysics  or  ontology  of  values.  If  this  be  what  is  meant  by 
defining  philosophy  as  the  theory  of  values,  the  limitation  is,  I 
think,  an  impossible  one  to  carry  out.  Intrinsic  values  are,  indeed, 
psychical  phenomena  and  functions  and,  therefore,  susceptible  of 
a  descriptive  psychological  treatment;  nevertheless,  by  their  very 
nature,  they  claim  to  be  more  than  contingent  psychical  phenom- 
ena, or  occasional  elements  in  a  phenomenal  causal  complex  of 
experience.  Philosophy,  since  it  is  concerned  with  the  final  prob- 
lems that  arise  out  of  the  character  of  experience  as  fragmentary 
and  partially  incoherent,  cannot  be  satisfied  with  an  empirical 
psychological  analysis  and  description  of  values.  The  problem  of 
truth-value  is  the  central  one.  For  the  value  of  truth  is  no  longer 
valid,  is  no  longer  an  intrinsic  value,  and  has  no  meaning  in  con- 
trast with  error,  if  truth  be  no  more  than  an  occasional,  or  even 
a  frequent,  product  of  a  blind  and  unthinking  complex  of  causal 
conditions.  If  truth  be  just  a  causal  product  in  a  psychological 
series,  just  one  element  in  the  psychical  complex  of  finite  experi- 
ences, this  proposition  is  no  truer  than  its  opposite  and  there  is  no 
truth.  A  partially  parallel  situation  obtains  in  regard  to  goodness, 
beauty,  and  holiness :  although  in  these  cases  the  situation  is  some- 
what different,  for,  if  there  be  no  intrinsic  validity  in  truth,  there 
can  be  no  sense  in  pursuing  farther  the  inquiry  as  to  the  reality 
and  truth  of  other  forms  of  value. 

To  say  that  the  problem  of  values  is  preeminently  the  problem 
of  philosophy,  means,  then,  that  the  fundamental  philosophical 
problem  is  that  of  the  relation  of  the  mind's  valuing,  purposing, 
and  attitude-taking  in  knowing,  contemplating,  doing,  and  wor- 
shiping, to  the  course  of  reality.  And,  we  do  not  evade  meta- 
physics, or  issue  in  a  new  era  of  thought,  for  which  these  questions 
will  appear  juvenile,  by  talking  about  values,  in  abstracto,  rather 
than  about  valuing  selves. 

If  all  values  are  real  only  for  subjects,  what  are  we  to  say  of 
objectivity  in  values  ?  The  objectivity  of  intrinsic  values  consists 
in  the  basic  fact  that  only  through  the  quest  and  possession  of  them 


PERSONALITY  AND   VALUES  407 

can  the  higher  life  of  selfhood  be  realized.  While  intrinsic  values 
can  have  no  actual  existence  apart  from  conscious  life,  and  hence 
are  real  only  as  affirmed  and  enjoyed  by  selves,  these  values  have 
an  objective  and  constraining  character;  they  possess  over- 
individual  validity.  Moral  and  intellectual  values,  and  I  think, 
too,  though  less  clearly  identifiable,  aesthetic  and  religious  values, 
are  objective  structures  in  the  life  of  personality.  The  evidence 
for  this  contention  is  that  without  the  service  of  values,  without 
seeking  and  attaining  these,  the  higher  selfhood  cannot  be  realized. 
The  objective  constitution  of  intrinsic  values  constrains  the  indi- 
vidual who,  if  he  denies  or  ignores  them,  does  not  become  a 
rational  and  moral  person.  One  cannot  be  a  thinker  if  one  ignore 
or  deny  the  principles  of  logical  thought.  One  cannot  be  a  well- 
integrated  personality  if  one  ignore  the  moral  values  of  personal 
relationship.  One  cannot  be  a  full-bodied  personality  if  one  ignore 
the  claims  of  aesthetic  values.  And  the  religious  values  in  some 
form  are  simply  the  most  comprehensive  expression  of  the  con- 
ditions of  the  harmony  of  the  self  with  itself  and  its  reconciliation 
with  the  universal  order.  Thus  intrinsic  values,  as  served, 
adjudged  and  enjoyed  by  selves,  are  to  be  regarded  as  a  real 
existent  order,  a  hyperphysical,  objective  structure.  The  essence 
of  objective  idealism,  in  contrast  with  subjective  idealism,  or 
mentalism,  is  the  acceptance  by  the  self  of  the  valid  authority  and 
reality  of  an  objective  order  of  values. 

The  Platonic  idealism  was  the  first  thoroughgoing  attempt  at 
a  metaphysic  of  values,  and  therefore  remains  the  norm  and  type 
of  all  objective  idealism.  In  Plato  intrinsic  values,  which  can  be 
seen  and  served  by  men,  are  regarded  as  authentic  revelations  of 
the  enduring  order  or  meaning  of  reality.  For  Aristotle,  too,  the 
aesthetic-intellectual  concept  of  the  pure  self-activity  of  reason 
represents  the  highest  value  and  the  supreme  reality.  Kant's 
whole  philosophy  is  controlled  by  the  concept  of  the  moral  value 
of  personality  and,  in  a  more  consistent  fashion,  the  philosophy  of 
Fichte.  For  Hegel  the  supreme  reality  is  identified  with  spirit 
as  the  unifying  ground  of  value.  For  him,  the  ultimate  meaning 
of  individual  experience,  history  and  nature,  is  the  realization, 
through  social  life,  art,  religion  and  philosophy,  by  the  finite  self 
of  its  own  individuality  in  conscious  harmony  with  the  absolute 
spirit.  Anglo-American  objective  idealism,  especially  in  Bradley, 
Bosanquet  and  Royce,  has  a  similar  purport.     Recent  philosophy 


408  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

of  values  in  Germany,  as  in  Windelband,  Kickert  and  Eucken, 
seeks  too,  in  the  objective  and  constraining  character  of  spiritual 
values,  the  key  to  the  meaning  of  reality.    All  great  religious  sys- 
tems, notably,  for  instance,  historic  Christianity,  are  declarations, 
in  imaginative  pictorial  symbols,   of  the  supreme  validity  and 
reality  of  an  objective  teleological  structure  or  order  of  spiritual 
values ;  by  laying  hold  on,  serving  and  enjoying  which,  the  indi- 
vidual alone  realizes  his  true  selfhood.    And  in  all  these  doctrines 
of  an  objective  structure  of  values,  the  individual  is  regarded  as 
a  socialized  self.     Some  thinkers  who  make  value  the  central  con- 
cept of  philosophy  have  tried  to  escape  the  necessity  for  a  meta- 
physics of  personality  by  having  recourse  to  a  "transcendental 
ought"    (sollen)    as  the  ultimate  ground  for  the  objectivity  of 
values.     How  a  mere  "ought"  or  "should"  can  be  the  objective 
ground  of  anything  passes  my  comprehension.     To  set  up  such  a 
notion  is  an  intellectually  vicious  abstractionism,  of  the  same  order 
as  that  which  would  ground  all  the  reality,  worth  of  personal  life, 
in  a  "consciousness  in  general"  (Bewusstsein  iiberhaupt).     Pure 
universals  do  not  exist  and  certainly  not  the  most  abstract  of  all 
universals,  either  consciousness  or  matter  or  being  in  general.4 
The  objective  reality  of  values  is  that  alone  of  qualities  of  persons. 
Whatever  reality  values  have  independent  of  finite  selves  they  can 
possess  only  as  essential  qualities  of  a  perfect  person  or  community 
of  persons.     If  we  recognize  that  the  willing  service  of  certain 
values,  such  as  justice,  love,  truth  and  beauty,  are  the  conditions 
through  which  our  spiritual  or  personal  lives  are  fulfilled,  this 
recognition  implies  that  such  values  inhere  in  the  constitution  of 
ultimate  reality  and  this  implies  that  reality,  at  its  highest  and 
most  permanent  level  is  spiritual  and  personal.     This  position  by 
no  means  involves  the  assumption  that  we  or  any  other  human 
beings  have  already  discovered  and  realized  all  the  values  which 
existence  makes  possible.    A  human  person  is  not  merely  what  he 
does,  but  what  he  is  capable  of  doing,5  and  being.     "Persons  can- 
not be  understood  by  what   they  have   achieved   at   any  given 
moment ;  their  nature  is  to  be  realizers  of  value."  6 


4  This  procedure  is  like  trying  to  shoot  a  tiger  by  aiming  at  him  in  general ; 
very  ineffective  and  dangerous  hunting. 

B  Sorley,  Moral  Values  and  the  Idea  of  God,  p.  190. 

c  Ibid.,  p.  240.  Cf.  many  passages  in  Eobert  Browning,  especially  Cristina 
and  Eabbi  Ben  Ezra. 


PERSONALITY  AND   VALUES  409 

Indeed  the  relation  between  the  human  person's  judgments 
and  realizations  of  value  and  the  objective  order  are  analogous  to 
the  relations  between  his  perceptions  and  scientific  theories  and 
the  objective  order. 

We  do  not  know  what  the  physical  order  would  be  like  apart 
from  the  conditions  of  our  experience.  Color,  sound,  form,  move- 
ment, etc.,  are  real  in  so  far  as  there  are  percipient  selves; 
scientific  theories  of  the  physical  world  are  valid  interpretations 
thereof  only  on  the  hypothesis  that  our  common  perceptions  are  not 
illusory;  scientific  theories  are  approximating  constructions  of 
the  physical  basis  of  our  experience  which  have  value  only  upon 
the  assumption  that  perception  is  not  illusion.  Similarly  with  the 
aesthetic  qualities  and,  I  will  add,  with  the  moral  qualities.  Logic- 
ally all  qualities  perceived  and  relations  apprehended  by  us  are 
on  the  same  footing,  although,  by  reason  of  the  greater  variability 
and  complexity  in  the  aesthetic  and  moral  reactions  of  individuals, 
by  reason  of  the  fact  that  the  tertiary  qualities  7  attributed  to 
reality  are  more  shot  through  by  feeling  and,  in  the  case  of  moral 
qualities,  have  more  directly  to  do  with  interpersonal  relations, 
there  is  a  greater  degree  of  subjectivity  and  disagreement  in  regard 
to  man's  aesthetic  and  moral  interpretations  of  his  world.  But  the 
differences  are  of  "degree"  and  I  shall  contend  at  length  in  later 
chapters,  that  the  aesthetic  and  moral,  yes,  and  even  the  religious, 
reactions  of  human  personality  to  its  cosmical  environment  have 
as  good  right  to  be  heard  in  making  up  a  theory  of  the  ultimate 
meaning  of  reality  as  have  his  perceptual  data  which  go  by  the 
name  of  "primary"  and  "secondary"  qualities. 

It  is  a  prejudice,  due  to  the  overvaluation  of  the  technical 
achievements  of  western  civilization  and  the  apparent  superiority 
of  mathematical  and  mechanical  methods,  that  condemns  aesthetic, 
moral  and  religious  valuations  as  mere  subjective  imaginings  and 
gives  objectivity  solely  to  mechanical  schemes  of  nature. 

If  we  have  the  right  to  say  that  man's  aesthetic,  moral  and 
religious  sentiments  are  genuine  data  for  the  interpretation  of  his 
place  in  the  universe  it  follows  therefrom  that,  since  the  values 
inherent  in  these  sentiments  always  have  lodgment  in  selves  or 
persons,  the  universe  is  personal  or  spiritual. 


TiEsthetie  qualities  of  nature  are  called  "tertiary"  by  analogy  with  the 
"primary"  and  "secondary"  qualities  of  perceptual  experience. 


410  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

We  human  selves  discover  values  and  in  their  realization 
become  persons  and  thereby  become  richer  and  more  harmonious 
finite  embodiments  of  the  meaningful  and  worthful  life  of  the 
universe.  Beauty,  for  instance,  is  its  own  excuse  for  being,  not 
because  beauty  is  truth  and  truth  beauty  but  because  it  is  true 
that  beauty  is  a  revelation  of  the  soul  of  things.  The  same  is  true 
of  justice,  love,  fellowship.  And  the  most  comprehensive  religious 
value  experience — communion  with  God — is  that  communion  of 
the  individual  person  with  the  cosmic  spirit  which  grows  in  wealth 
and  harmony  with  the  growth  of  personality  in  insight,  love  and 
wisdom.  For  the  deepest  quality  in  man,  that  which  makes  him 
a  person  or  spirit  in  becoming,  is  the  capacity  to  transcend  his 
natural  or  biological  selfhood  and  to  take  on  more  universal  and 
richer  spiritual  quality.  Man  is  essentially  a  God-seeker,  one  who 
can  become  divine.  This  destiny  of  spiritual  progress  through 
self-transcendence  is  the  deepest  word  of  the  greatest  human 
thinkers.  "Not  my  will  but  thine  be  done."  "For  me  to  live  is 
Christ,  and  to  die  is  gain."  "Forgetting  the  things  which  are 
behind,  and  stretching  forward  to  the  things  which  are  before, 
I  press  on  toward  the  goal  unto  the  prize  of  the  high  calling." 
"He  that  findeth  his  life  shall  lose  it,  and  he  that  loseth  his  life 
for  my  sake  shall  find  it."  "Join  a  whole  or  make  one."  (Jesus, 
Paul  and  Goethe.)  So  too  the  doctrine  of  the  union  of  the  indi- 
vidual soul  with  the  universal  soul ;  Plato's  doctrine  of  the  good ; 
Aristotle's  contemplative  life;  the  Stoic  life  in  harmony  with  the 
logos ;  the  mystic's  contemplative  and  ecstatic  union  with  the  one. 
Through  these  and  other  one-sided  or  partial  expressions  of  the  same 
principle  there  shines  one  fundamental  truth — the  absolute  prin- 
ciple of  value,  the  objective  ground  of  all  values  is  personality, 
spiritual  selfhood  in  widest  commonalty  spread.  Whatever  en- 
riches and  stabilizes  the  life  of  spiritual  selfhood  and  of  community 
which  is  the  atmosphere  in  which  personality  lives  and  moves  and 
has  its  being,  has  value.  The  objective  reality  of  all  values  is  the 
interdependent  life  of  personality  and  community. 

All  values  are  relative,  but  not  in  the  sense  that  no  values  are 
objectively  valid.  All  values  are  relative  in  the  sense  that  they 
are  related  to,  have  their  ground  in,  personality.  Some  values 
are  wholly  instrumental  and  others  chiefly  so.  Economic  values 
are,  from  our  standpoint,  purely  instrumental ;  they  serve  the  life 
of  personality.     Bodily  values  are  chiefly  so,  since  personality  is 


PERSONALITY  AND  VALUES  411 

essentially  spirit,  but  not  wholly  so,  since  body  contributes  some- 
thing directly  to  spiritual  self-fulfillment.  The  values  furthered 
by  political  and  technical  organizations  are  chiefly  instrumental. 
On  the  other  hand  in  so  far  as  the  nation-state,  for  instance,  is  the 
adequate  expression  of  the  soul  and  culture  of  a  people  it  tends  to 
become  a  genuine  spiritual  community.  But  the  state,  perhaps, 
can  never  be  a  spiritual  community.  The  family,  the  group  of 
friends,  the  church,  are  genuine  spiritual  communities  and  hence 
their  values  are  not  purely  instrumental.  They  are  means  which 
become  essential  parts  of  the  end — since  it  is  in  love,  fellowship, 
and  devotion  that  spiritual  personality  is  realized. 

All  values  are  related  to  persons  and  thus  person-dependent.  Is 
there  a  scale  of  values  ?  No,  for  this  would  imply  that  the  values 
of  life  could  be  measured  mathematically  on  a  common  standard. 
Personal  values  constitute  a  system,  a  harmonious  hyperorganic 
whole;  for  the  ideal  personality  is  a  harmonious  spiritual  whole, 
in  which  the  principle  of  the  whole  lives  in  each  part  and  each 
part  lives  only  as  a  part  of  the  whole.  And  the  individual  person 
can  be  such  only  as  a  member  of  the  cosmic  spiritual  system,  since 
the  interpersonal  and  the  intrapersonal  values  are  interdependent. 
One  can  become  a  free  and  rational  spirit  only  through  member- 
ship in  the  ideal  spiritual  community. 

Some  philosophers  who  make  value  the  central  concept  of 
philosophy  hold  that,  in  place  of  a  metaphysic  of  selves,  philosophy 
should  aim  at  a  metaphysic  of  values — that  the  ultimate  goal  of 
thought  is  the  rational  faith  in  the  supremacy  of  values.8  This, 
it  seems  to  me,  is  to  substitute  a  set  of  abstractions  for  concrete 
actualities;  it  is  to  give  way  to  the  temptation  to  hypostatize 
abstract  entities,  when  confronted  with  the  difficulties  involved  in 
establishing  on  rational  grounds  a  faith  in  the  value  and  per- 
manence of  conscious  individuality  or  personality.  Values  have 
no  existence  as  such ;  in  other  words,  apart  from  persons,  integrity, 
justice,  love,  happiness,  beauty  and  perfection  do  not  exist.  As 
Mr.  Sorley  puts  it :  "Moral  perfection  is  of  supreme  value  but  not 
the  mere  concept  of  moral  perfection."  "The  subject  of  values  is 
always  something  we  describe  by  a  concrete  term."  "When  the 
world  is  judged  to  be  good  or  bad  it  is  as  the  environment  of  per- 
sons."    Thus  when  the  question  is  raised  whether  man  has  any 

8  For  instance  Rickert,  Windelband  and  Miinsterberg. 
i 


412  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

reasonable  right  to  believe  in  the  supremacy  and  permanence  of 
values  in  the  universe,  one  has  only  put,  in  more  abstract  form, 
the  question :  Has  man  a  right  to  a  rational  faith  in  the  supremacy 
or  permanence  of  a  society  of  persons  in  the  universe  ?  Has  he  a 
right  to  believe  that  rational  individuality  grows  and  endures  in 
the  cosmos  and  that  the  ruling  order  of  the  cosmos  is  the  continuous 
fruition  of  a  commonwealth  of  persons  ? 

Beyond  the  harmonious  enrichment  and  expansion  of  personal 
experience,  as  at  once  individual  and  universal,  there  is  no  prin- 
ciple discoverable  for  the  unification  of  values.  Values  per  se, 
apart  from  the  attitudes  and  achievements  of  selves,  have  no  sub- 
stantive existence.  The  evolution  of  values  is  the  evolution  of 
personality.  Hence,  in  affirming  and  realizing  the  most  universal 
values  the  self  is  discovering  and  affirming  the  conditions  of  its  own 
spiritual  and  rational  functioning. 

If  the  so-called  absolute  values  have  no  self-existence  beyond 
the  interpersonal  and  intrapersonal  affirmations  of  selves,  it  follows 
that  there  can  be  no  universal  cosmical  ground  and  sustaining 
unity  of  human  values,  unless  there  be  a  cosmical  ground  for  the 
lives  of  finite  persons.  Logical,  ethical,  aesthetic,  and  religious 
valuations  can  have  no  absolute  basis  unless  personality  have  an 
absolute  basis.  The  ultimate  foundation  of  spiritual  values  must 
reside  in  a  supreme  self  or  nowhere.  If  personality  have  a  meta- 
physical basis  of  reality,  then  ideal  values  may  be  permanently 
valid  and  effective  in  the  cosmical  process ;  but  the  ground  of  the 
permanent  validity  of  values  must  not  be  so  conceived  as  to  rob 
the  evolution  of  finite  personalities  of  all  significance. 

In  brief,  the  authority  and  persistence  of  the  intrinsic  values 
of  human  experience  require  the  hypothesis  of  a  supreme  conscious 
unity  and  ground  and  conservator  of  values,  that  is,  of  a  self  who 
is  the  sustainer  of  all  these  values  which  are  progressively  dis- 
covered, affirmed,  and  realized  in  the  social,  ethical,  aesthetic, 
intellectual  and  religious  experiences  of  human  persons. 

If  ethical  values  and  other  intrinsic  values  that  may  be  essen- 
tial conditions  and  qualities  of  personality  have  a  cosmic  ground, 
that  means,  translated  into  more  concrete  terms,  that  the  life  of 
personality  is  rooted  and  grounded  in  the  nature  of  the  cosmos. 
We  cannot  attempt  further  discussion  of  this  question  of  all  ques- 
tions until  we  have  surveyed  more  fully  the  nature  of  human 
values  and  the  general  structure  of  reality. 


PERSONALITY  AND   VALUES  413 

I  remark,  however,  by  way  of  conclusion — that  the  course  of 
evolution  has  resulted  in  the  emergence  and  expansion  of  person- 
ality and  its  values;  that  teleological  activity,  that  is,  in  man, 
activity  directed  toward  the  achievement  and  maintenance  of 
values,  is  an  obvious  empirical  characteristic  of  the  world  order, 
and  that  no  doctrine  of  evolution  which  is  to  be  adequate  to  the 
facts  can  escape  employing  the  notions  of  direction,  end,  and  value. 
No  matter  how  human  and  personal  values  got  into  the  evolu- 
tionary process,  they  are  here,  and,  probably  they  are  growing  in 
wealth  of  content  and  effectiveness  of  expression.  By  whatever 
mechanism  it  may  have  happened,  the  evolutionary  process  has 
brought  forth  human  and  spiritual  values,  and  it  continues  to 
manifest  them  to  an  increasing  degree  and  with  a  growing  wealth 
of  content.  It  can  hardly  have  produced  them  out  of  nothing  and 
by  chance  in  a  blind  chaos.  It  would  seem  that  a  humanistic  prin- 
ciple, a  power  not  ourselves  making  for  personality,  must  have 
been  at  work  in  it  all  along.  If  so,  the  evolutionary  process  only 
fully  explains  itself  in  terms  of  its  labor,  however  slowly  and 
toilsomely  the  work  may  seem  to  be  accomplished,  to  bring  forth 
persons  and  their  valuations  of  their  experiences.  If  the  process 
of  evolution  be  not  capable  of  some  such  interpretation  I  cannot 
see  that  it  is  explicable  at  all.  For  truth,  the  central  determining 
value  of  conscious  reflective  life,  and  goodness,  beauty,  and  holi- 
ness, the  other  determining  values  of  personality,  by  their  very 
nature  claim  to  be  more  than  occasional  precipitations  of  cosmical 
weather.  These  values,  and  the  conscious  spirits  in  which  they 
inhere  and  function,  must  claim  to  be  continuously  valid  principles 
for  the  interpretation  of  reality,  and  continuously  effective  prin- 
ciples in  the  evolution  of  the  same  reality.  Without  the  recog- 
nition of  such  principles,  evolution  is  unintelligible,  since  intelli- 
gible change  involves  continuity  of  direction  and  of  ends.  It  is 
precisely  such  a  progressive  continuity  of  meaning  that  is  afforded 
by  the  hypothesis  of  the  persistent  reality  and  effectiveness  of  per- 
sons and  their  valuations.  If  intrinsic  values  are  valid,  and  if  the 
world-process  has  a  continuous  whole  of  meaning,  then  persons 
must,  no  matter  when  or  how  they  may  make  their  appearance  in 
the  history  of  the  temporal  universe,  be  true  manifestations  of  a 
supreme  personality,  or,  if  the  term  be  preferred,  of  a  supra- 
personality. 


CHAPTER  XXX 


ETHICAL  VALUES1 


Ethics  is  the  science  of  the  intrinsic  values  of  the  individual 
life,  when  considered  in  its  social  relations ;  it  asks,  what  are  the 
standards  of  good  conduct  that  are  desirable  from  the  viewpoint 
of  social  well-being.  Its  business  is  to  determine  and  interpret 
those  ends  of  concerted  human  striving  which  are  worthy  to  be 
sought  on  their  own  account,  and  to  organize  them  into  a  har- 
monious system  of  social  goods  or  values.  If,  therefore,  moral 
goodness  is  primarily  a  quality  of  persons,  if  all  moral  values  are 
personal  values,  ethics  is  a  science  of  personality  in  a  peculiarly 
intimate  and  full  sense.  We  must  first  consider  whether  all  moral 
values  are  qualities  of  persons. 

The  moral  judgment  is  passed,  in  the  first  instance,  on  acts, 
but,  in  its  ultimate  reference,  on  conscious  agents  regarded  as  self- 
determining  and  responsible  centers  of  volition.  Intrinsic  moral 
quality  or  value  can  therefore  inhere  only  in  the  dispositions  and 
activities  of  selves.  Material  things  and  processes,  wealth,  social 
institutions,  science  and  art,  are  not  intrinsically  or  ethically  good ; 
they  are  good  only  with  respect  to  their  consequences  in  the  expan- 
sion and  harmonization  of  the  life  of  rational  selfhood.  Kant 
expressed  this  truth  finely  in  his  great  saying,  "There  is  nothing 
in  the  world,  and,  indeed,  nothing  that  we  can  think  outside  the 
same,  that  we  can  regard  as  good  without  limitation,  except  the 
good  will."2  By  will  Kant  means  the  personal  disposition  (Ge- 
sinnung)  to  choose  and  pursue  ends  with  full  view  of  their  con- 
sequences. 

He  does  not  mean  a  life  of  "good  intentions,"  with  which,  as 
the  popular  proverb  runs,  hell  may  be  paved.     The  supreme  good 


1  This  chapter  is  the  revision  and  expansion  of  an  article  ' '  Ethics,  Sociology 
and  Personality' '  in  The  Philosophical  Review,  Vol.  xv,  No.  5,  September, 
1906;   pp.  494-510. 

aKant,  Metaphysics  of  Morality,  Section  1. 

414 


ETHICAL  VALUES  415 

is  the  maximum  realization  of  the  capacities  for  feeling  and 
activity  (including,  of  course,  thought  as  a  form  of  activity)  of 
the  socialized  individual  or  person.  Ultimately  there  can  be  no 
good  which  is  not  affirmed  or  experienced  by  selves,  and  no  virtue 
which  is  not  the  quality  of  a  conscious  and  free  individuality.  All 
moral  values  are  functions  of  personality.  For  example,  truthful- 
ness is  harmony  between  personal  thought  and  its  expression; 
temperance  or  self-control  is  the  subordination  and  direction  of 
the  sensuous  appetites  to  the  wider  aesthetic,  intellectual,  and  social 
aims  of  the  self ;  courage  is  the  power  and  will  to  affirm  in  action 
and  in  suffering  the  integrity  and  supremacy  of  the  rational  self ; 
justice,  the  all-controlling  form  of  social  virtue,  is  the  effective 
recognition,  by  a  person  or  group  of  persons,  of  the  intrinsic  worth 
and  inalienable  rights  of  personality  in  other  selves;  injustice 
contradicts  the  nature  of  personality,  since  it  is  the  denial  to  others 
of  that  worth  which  we  affirm  in  ourselves ;  and  when,  for  example, 
we  say  a  man  is  not  just  to  himself  we  mean  that  he  is  ignoring  or 
denying  the  intrinsic  dignity  of  his  own  rational  nature;  wisdom 
is  right  judgment  in  regard  to  the  relative  values  of  specific  per- 
sonal ends,  and  in  regard  to  the  determination  of  the  right  means 
for  the  attainment  of  these  ends;  benevolence  or  active  sympathy, 
friendship,  and  love  are  forms  of  that  interpersonal  feeling  which, 
as  we  shall  show  more  fully  later  on,  is  the  very  basis  and  goal 
of  the  richest  and  most  harmonious  selfhood. 

On  the  other  hand,  as  we  have  already  seen,  persons  are  social- 
ized individuals.  Society  is  an  interpersonal  mental  world. 
Hence,  moral  values  are  at  once  individual  in  origin  and  enjoy- 
ment and  social  in  reference  and  consequences.  To  say  that  my 
ethical  valuations  are  social  is  another  way  of  saying  that,  as 
ethical  being,  the  ends  which  I  value  and  strive  for  have  to  do 
with  other  persons  as  well  as  myself.  I  am  a  person  only  in  a 
world  of  persons. 

Society  undergoes  historical  evolution,  and  ethical  valuations 
are  both  factors  in,  and  resultants  of,  social  evolution.  The 
specific  ethical  goods,  the  virtues,  duties,  and  rights,  that  are  ex- 
pressed in  moral  judgments  and  that  control  moral  activity,  from 
period  to  period  and  from  place  to  place  in  the  historical  world, 
undergo  change  in  the  cultural  evolution  of  races,  nations,  and 
social  groups,  and  in  the  moral  development  of  individuals.  It 
may  truly  be  said  that  any  social  group — for  example,  a  church, 


416  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

college,  a  labor  union,  a  civic  community,  a  nation,  or,  on  a  wider 
scale,  an  epoch  of  human  culture,  such  as  the  apostolic  age  of  the 
Christian  Church  or  the  European  Renaissance — is  a  spiritual 
medium  for  the  development  of  personality.  In  the  moral  evolu- 
tion of  humanity  it  sometimes  happens  that  the  virtues  of  another 
age  and  race  are  vices  and  crimes  of  to-day  and  here.  Contem- 
porary cultural  variations  in  the  content  of  moral  judgment,  for 
example,  in  Borneo,  Japan,  China,  England,  to-day,  represent 
different  levels  of  moral  evolution. 

Moral  valuations,  then,  are  historically  conditioned  products; 
culture-history,  in  turn,  is  the  product  of  personal  and  interper- 
sonal judgments  and  acts.  The  significance  and  validity  of  ethical 
values  in  the  concrete  cannot  be  understood  apart  from  their  his- 
tory. And  to  trace  the  historical  evolution  of  moral  values  in 
detail  is  a  very  interesting  and  important  task  of  culture-history; 
for  example,  from  the  morals  of  a  primitive  tribe  to  the  social 
ethics  of  the  Hebrew  prophets  is  a  long  step,  and  a  considerable 
step  further  it  is  from  the  Hebrew  ethics  of  a  theocratic  society, 
in  which  perfect  justice  and  love  should  reign,  to  the  rational 
individualism  of  to-day.  Here,  however,  we  are  concerned  only 
with  the  general  principles  for  the  interpretation  of  the  evolution 
of  moral  values  in  society  and  not  with  the  details  of  social-moral 
evolution.  Is  there  traceable  in  the  evolution  of  moral  values  a 
well-defined  movement  towards  the  recognition  of  a  rational  self 
or  person  as  the  final  bearer  of  values  ?  What  is  the  relation  of 
this  historical  evolution  to  the  development  of  personality  in  the 
individual  ?  Are  there  distinct  levels  or  stages  of  social-moral 
evolution  and  of  individual-moral  development  ?  Both  questions 
I  shall  answer  in  the  affirmative.  Individual  development  is  an 
epitome  of  social  evolution.  The  moral  evolution  in  society  and 
the  moral  development  in  the  individual  reciprocally  determine 
one  another. 

There  are  three  clearly  distinct  stages  of  social-moral  evolution 
and  of  individual-moral  development.  First,  is  the  "customary" 
social  or  "tribal"  morality.  At  this,  the  lowest  level  of  dis- 
tinctively human  social  order,  men  obey  without  question  the  con- 
ventional or  customary  rules  of  action  of  the  family,  tribe,  clan, 
or  city.  The  individual  shows  no  critical  independence  in  moral 
judgment.  His  practical  consciousness  is  the  echo  of  accumulated 
and  consecrated  tribal  experiences  and  beliefs  as  to  what  conduct 


ETHICAL  VALUES  417 

is  obligatory,  permissible,  or  impermissible.  Conduct  is  guided 
wholly  by  social  instincts  and  habits.  No  one  thinks  of  doing  that 
which  is  right  in  his  own  eyes.  In  fact  there  is  as  yet  no  con- 
sciousness of  anything  as  being  right  simply  in  the  individual's 
eyes.  This  first  stage,  the  morality  of  custom  and  unwritten  law, 
is  illustrated  by  the  customs  of  "taboo"  in  vogue  among  savage 
peoples,  and  by  the  morality  of  peoples  in  early  stages  of  civiliza- 
tion ;  for  example,  by  the  tribal  morality  of  the  early  Hebrews  and 
Greeks,  and,  to  a  very  considerable  extent,  of  the  Chinese  to-day. 
The  social  group  and  not  the  individual  is  held  responsible.  There 
is  no  clear  distinction  between  the  group  and  the  individual  in  the 
matter  of  merit  and  demerit,  or  between  morals  and  ceremonials, 
or  moral  and  religious  observances.  Since  human  civilization  is 
full  of  "survivals,"  one  finds  many  traces  of  customary  morality 
among  the  most  advanced  peoples.  Indeed,  one  finds  in  highly 
civilized  nations  many  individuals,  who,  for  lack  of  inborn 
capacity  or  education,  never  get  beyond  the  customary  stage  at 
all;  they  are  guided  and  restrained  in  their  actions  simply  by  the 
social  patterns  which  they  repeat  without  thought  and  would  not 
dare  to  question. 

The  passage  from  the  first  level  to  the  second  level  of  moral 
evolution  is  brought  about  by  the  conflict  which  ensues  between 
the  desires  and  ideas  of  reflective  individuals,  who  are  becoming 
conscious  of  themselves  as  separate  and  free  existences,  and  the 
morality  of  tribal  custom  and  law.  Historical  illustrations  of  this 
conflict  are  to  be  found  in  the  "sophistical"  age  of  Greek  enlighten- 
ment, in  the  Renaissance,  the  eighteenth  century  enlightenment, 
and  again,  for  the  whole  of  western  civilization,  at  the  present 
time.  A  fine  literary  embodiment  of  this  conflict  is  the  Antigone 
of  Sophocles.  In  and  through  this  conflict  of  the  reflective  indi- 
vidual with  traditionary  custom,  self-conscious  rationality  is  en- 
gendered. Conduct  first  becomes  a  problem  for  thought.  Without 
its  "storm  and  stress,"  ethical  self-consciousness  is  not  born  in  an 
individual  life  or  in  a  national  culture.  This  stage  of  critical  and 
reflective  individualism  we  term  the  second  level  of  moral  devel- 
opment. 

The  third  principal  level  of  moral  development  is  that  on  which 
the  individual  has  gained  a  critical  insight  into  the  rationale  of 
social  morality,  and  consciously  identifies  his  own  moral  interests 
and  standards  of  action  with  those  of  society,  in  so  far  as  the  latter 


418  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

are  rational  and  coherent.  At  this  level  the  individual  becomes 
aware  of  the  rational  meaning  and  justification  of  social  or  insti- 
tutional morals-  He  finds  a  spiritual  life  for  himself  through 
action  in  harmony  with  the  social  reason,  that  is,  with  mind 
objectified  in  social  and  historical  institutions.  Historically  this 
stage  is  exemplified  by  the  political  and  social  philosophy  of  Plato 
and  Aristotle,  and,  in  part,  by  the  social  teachings  of  the  Hebrew 
prophets.  Its  most  comprehensive  modern  philosophical  expres- 
sions are  the  ethics  of  Kant  and  Fichte,  the  Philosophy  of  Right 
of  Hegel,3  and  the  'works  of  the  English  Utilitarians  and  the 
English  Hegelians,  such  as  T.  H.  Green,  Mackenzie,  Bradley  and 
Bosanquet. 

In  the  individual  life  the  young  man  comes  to  see  the  necessity 
and  meaning  of  "custom"  and  "law"  in  family,  community,  state, 
and  church.  He  finds  a  more  stable  and  rationally  ordered  inner 
life  by  obeying,  and  assimilating  into  his  own  feeling  and  will, 
social  "law"  and  "principle"  as  indispensable  conditions  of  social 
stability  and  well-being. 

But  on  the  third  level  there  arises  the  consciousness  of  the 
imperfect  rationality  and  inner  inconsistency  of  the  actual  social- 
moral  institutions,  in  whose  formation  and  growth  reason  has  only 
worked  imperfectly  and  intermittently,  because  hindered  by  the 
partly  contingent  and  blind  character  of  social  evolution.  There 
is  now  a  sense  of  the  failure  of  the  existing  and  inherited  social- 
moral  institutions  and  usages  wholly  to  meet  the  demands  of  the 
growing  spirit,  unless  these  institutions  are  rejuvenated  and  trans- 
formed from  within  by  the  insights  and  deeds  of  the  rational  self. 

Actual  and  traditional  moral  conventions,  in  custom,  law,  and 
social  prejudice,  tend  to  become  ossified,  and  thus  to  arrest  the  free 
growth  of  personality.  For  example,  the  actual  democratic  state 
falls  below  the  democratic  ideal  of  a  citizenship  of  free  persons. 
Its  working  constitution  fails  to  meet  new  demands  of  the  per- 
sonal life. 

The  actual  state,  community,  church,  or  family,  may  retard, 
instead  of  furthering,  the  inward  growth  of  a  spiritual  individual- 
ity.    The  community-life  may  be  stagnant  and  mechanized.     The 


•It  is  true  that  Hegel  one-sidedly  emphasizes  the  complete  rationality 
of  social  morality  as  all  included  in  the  spirit  of  the  state  or  political  society. 
Nietzsche,  with  his  equally  one-sided  expression  of  the  principle  of  individual- 
istic self-assertion,  is  the  foil  to  Hegel. 


ETHICAL  VALUES  419 

church  may  not  respond  to  the  higher  intellectual  and  social  con- 
science. The  family  may  be  blind  or  indifferent  to  the  individual's 
spiritual  needs.  There  may  arise  a  clash  between  the  conditions 
and  usages  of  existing  social  ethics,  and  political  life,  and  the 
''infinite"  needs  of  the  spirit;  or  the  existing  institutions  may 
simply  fail,  through  arrest  and  decay,  to  meet  the  demands  of  the 
rational  spirit  in  its  developing  individuality.  Such  was  the  case 
in  Greek  life  after  the  period  of  political  decay  set  in;  and  the 
Stoic  and  Epicurean  ethical  theories  were  attempts  to  meet  the 
moral  needs  of  the  individual  loosened  from  his  ancient  social  and 
political  moorings.  Such  was  the  case  in  Judasa  and  in  the  Roman 
world  at  large  at  the  beginning  of  Christianity.  Such  was  the 
case,  once  again,  at  the  period  of  the  Protestant  Reformation  and 
of  the  Revolution  in  France.  Such  in  many  relations  of  life 
seems  to  be  the  case  at  the  present  time.  The  existing  confusion 
of  moral  judgments  in  regard  to  the  ethics  of  industry  and  com- 
merce, of  the  family,  of  political  organization,  of  credal  subscrip- 
tion in  the  churches,  of  nationalism  and  internationalism,  indicate 
that  the  inherited  and  conventional  social  standards  do  not  meet 
the  spiritual  needs  of  individuality,  developing  under  the  stress 
of  a  multitude  of  changing  conditions  in  the  economic,  political, 
intellectual,  and  religious  spheres.  Such  confusion  lays  upon  the 
thinking  individual  a  new  and  inescapable  burden  of  rational  re- 
flection and  independent  choice.  To-day  the  individual  is  pre- 
eminently challenged  to  stand  upon  his  own  feet  morally  and  to 
trust  for  support  to  his  own  rational  will.  The  moral  personality 
must  now,  as  in  the  days  of  the  Stoics  and  Jesus,  seek  its  fulfill- 
ment and  fruition  in  a  spiritual  life  that  goes  beyond  established 
social  and  moral  conventions  in  the  interest  of  a  better  social  order. 
In  all  advancing  civilization  the  individual  has  doubtless  met  this 
problem,  and  the  spiritual  differences  between  culture-epochs  are 
largely  due  to  the  varying  extent  and  depth  with  which  the  con- 
sciousness of  the  moral  life  as  a  personal  problem  may  be  felt. 

At  this  third  and  highest  level  of  moral  insight  and  endeavor 
the  individual  fulfills  the  demands  of  the  established  social  order, 
in  so  far  as  these  are  not  in  contradiction  with  the  social  and  per- 
sonal values,  in  the  affirmation  of  which  the  thinking  self  works 
out,  with  reference  to  his  unique  situation  and  inner  nature,  the 
universal  principles  of  a  rational  and  free  humanity.  At  this  level 
the  given  customary  and  institutional  system  of  moral  values  ceases 


420  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

to  be  ultimately  authoritative  aud  determinative.  The  ideals  or 
values  affirmed  by  rational  self-conscious  spirit  are  indeed  social  as 
well  as  individual ;  but  the  distinction  has  now  arisen  between  the 
moral  life  as  fact  and  as  problem. 

The  highest  stage  in  moral  evolution  is  the  birth  of  rational 
self-consciousness,  in  which  the  individual  becomes  fully  aware,  at 
once  of  his  moral  individuality,  as  this  is  defined  by  his  actual 
capacities  and  social  situation,  and  of  the  universal  human  and 
spiritual  values  that  demand  and  must  win  expression  through  the 
medium  of  this  very  individuality  of  nature  and  uniqueness  of 
situation. 

It  is  not  meant  that  every  individual,  or  any  portion  of  the 
human  race  which  constitutes  a  continuous  unity  of  cultural  evolu- 
tion, must  of  necessity  go  through  all  the  above-mentioned  stages 
of  moral  development,  in  such  fashion  that  all  the  stages  can  be 
clearlv  marked  out.  Perhaps  only  relatively  few  individuals  in 
a  highly  civilized  society  even  to-day  with  full  consciousness  reach 
the  third  level.  The  first  level  may  be  so  much  abbreviated  as  to 
be  scarcely  distinguishable.  China  has  apparently  not  yet  passed 
into  the  second  level,4  whereas  Japan  is  moving  towards  the  recog- 
nition of  free  individuality.  The  earlier  levels  persist  and  cut 
into  the  later  in  the  actual  movement  of  cultural-history.  These 
three  levels  represent  the  immaTient  logic  of  moral  evolution.  In 
the  race,  and  in  the  individual,  morality  moves  through  these 
critical  phases  towards  free  and  rational  personality  as  its  im- 
manent goal  and  spiritual  principle  of  interpretation. 

Society's  moral  function  is  to  crystallize  into  definite  institu- 
tional form  that  minimum  of  rules  of  conduct  which  are  necessary 
to  insure  the  existence  and  perpetuity  of  some  measure  of  stable 
social  order.  Society,  usually  in  the  comprehensive  forms  of  the 
state  (with  its  subordinate  forms)  and  the  church,  is  the  con- 
server  and  transmitter  of  moral  tradition  and  of  the  economic, 
intellectual,  legal  and  political  framework  of  the  common  life. 
But  there  is  in  actual  society  as  such  no  principle  of  moral  dis- 
covery and  progress.  These  originate  in  individuals.  There  may 
be  widespread  inarticulate  moral  tendencies  and  movements  at 
work  in  society,  for  instance,  in  the  Koman  Empire  at  the  begin- 


*  This  was  written  before  the  Chinese  Revolution.     Demoralization  means 
'  de-more fation,"  the  disintegration  of  customary  code  of  morality. 


ETHICAL  VALUES  421 

ning  of  the  Christian  era.  Indeed,  without  such  ripeness  of  the 
time  no  new  ethical  movement  could  make  headway.  But  the 
existence  of  such  tendencies  means  that  many  individuals  or 
groups  of  individuals  have  common  aspirations  and  longings  that 
await  articulate  expression  and  satisfaction.  And  such  tendencies 
do  not  become  efficient  forces  in  social  and  ethical  progress  until 
they  get  definite  and  powerful  expression  through  creative  person- 
alities who  transcend,  by  their  force  in  conceiving  and  applying 
an  ideal,  their  own  existential  state  as  part  of  the  empirical  social 
order. 

In  ethics,  as  in  religion,  philosophy,  and  art,  progress  emanates 
from  the  actions  of  great  or  socially  creative  personalities.  The 
mainspring  of  ethical  discovery  and  progress,  then,  is  an  over- 
social  and  ideal  force  in  the  individual.  Neither  goodness  nor  truth 
is  furthered  or  determined  by  merely  counting  heads.  And  this 
over-social  and  ideal  principle  of  personal  conduct  will  enjoin  new 
social  attitudes  that,  in  reference  to  the  existing  order,  represent 
a  higher  social  ideal.  But  it  may  also  enjoin  attitudes  that  have 
no  obvious  application  to  any  actual  social  order.  It  is  no  doubt 
true  that  the  great  bulk  of  our  ideas  and  activities  as  moral  beings 
have  a  direct  social  reference,  and  that,  practically,  it  is  better  that 
the  social  aspects  of  our  actions  should  be  emphasized,  since  we 
are  not  usually  in  danger  of  neglecting  those  goods  which  make 
the  strongest  appeals  to  our  private  interests.  This  consideration 
does  not,  however,  affect  the  principle  that  the  free  and  rational 
activity  of  persons  is  the  highest  stage  of  ethical  development. 

Personality  is  the  central  and  determining  standard  of  value  in 
all  moral  progress.  We  cannot  fully  describe,  in  set  terms,  what 
it  is  to  be  a  moral  personality  in  the  concrete;  but  we  may  define 
a  moral  person  as  a  rational  self-determining  individual  who,  by 
his  own  initiative,  strives  to  transcend  mere  custom  or  convention 
and  to  lift  himself  and  others  into  a  spiritually  richer  and  more 
harmonious  life,  while  faithfully  performing  the  duties  of  his 
station. 

A  clear  evidence  that  the  self-determining  individual  is  the 
central  principle  of  value  in  social  evolution  may  be  found  in  the 
general  identification  of  the  significance  of  any  great  historical 
civilization  with  the  work  and  characters  of  its  outstanding  per- 
sonalities. In  the  general  mind  Moses,  Isaiah  and  the  other 
prophets,  Jesus,  Paul,  and  John  stand  for  the  spiritual  qualities 


422  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

of  Hebrew  civilization.  Socrates,  Plato,  and  Aristotle,  Homer, 
yEschylus,  Sophocles  and  Euripides,  stand  for  Greek  culture. 
Anselm,  the  great  Mystics,  Thomas  Aquinas,  and  Dante  stand 
for  mediaBval  culture.  Petrarch,  Leonardo  da  Vinci,  Michel- 
angelo, Eaphael  and  a  few  others  represent  the  civilization  of  the 
Italian  Kenaissance.  Luther,  Zwingli,  Calvin,  Cranmer,  Kidley 
and  Latimer  represent  the  Protestant  Keformation. 

These  are  a  few  illustrations  of  the  general  principle  that  the 
worth  and  meaning  of  any  great  movement  of  human  social  evolu- 
tion is  represented  and  summed  up  in  its  great  outstanding  per- 
sonalities. Social  progress  and  social  good  are  meaningless  and 
unreal,  except  in  so  far  as  they  are  concreted  in  persons.  The 
respect  paid  to  personality,  and  the  scope  allowed  for  its  free 
development,  are  the  truest  measures  of  the  moral  quality  of  a 
culture,  the  true  standards  of  human  progress.  The  reflective  life 
of  self-determining  persons  is  the  only  absolutely  worthful  reality 
we  know.  Therefore  Kant  rightly  says,  "Act  so  as  to  treat 
humanity,  whether  in  thine  own  person  or  in  the  person  of  another 
always  as  an  end  and  never  merely  as  a  means,"  G  and  Hegel,  "Be 
a  person." 

The  moral  development  of  personality  is  a  dialectic  movement 
or  growth  through  contrast,  in  which  there  are  two  constant  terms, 
sometimes  in  opposition  and  at  other  times  in  harmony — the  indi- 
vidual with  his  unique  feelings,  his  private  desires  and  interests ; 
and  the  social  order  with  its  over-individual  demands  and  sanc- 
tions. As  a  matter  of  fact  the  conflict  is  chiefly  between  wider 
and  narrower,  deeper  and  shallower,  social  interests  in  which  the 
individual's  life  is  implicated,  not  between  an  atomic  or  socially 
isolated  individual  and  the  social  order.  Normally,  there  is  no 
such  being  as  an  atomic  individual.  The  individual  as  a  rational 
judge  of  conduct  in  a  critical  situation  which  has  a  unique  char- 
acter, as  the  never-to-be  repeated  situation  of  just  this  person  here 
and  now,  transcends  the  actual  moral  traditions  of  society.  In 
this  sense  every  consciously  ethical  act  of  a  person  which  involves 
reflection  and  choice  of  alternatives  has  an  individual  and  unique 
character.  On  the  other  hand  the  moral  life  of  man  is  an  inter- 
personal life.  We  feel  both  natural  impulses  and  moral  obligations 
to  promote  the  welfare  of  other  persons.    The  great  moral  leaders 

6  Critique  of  Practical  Beason. 


ETHICAL  VALUES  423 

of  the  race  have  always  rightly  insisted  that  the  good  life  is  to  he 
found  in  communion  with  other  lives  and  in  devotion  to  wider 
rational  and  social  interests. 

This  mutual  dependence  and  reciprocal  influence  of  ego  and 
alter  or,  more  accurately,  of  the  individual's  various  "selves,"  in 
conduct  is  the  dialectic  of  the  ethical  life.  Intrinsic  ethical  goods 
are  forms  of  self-realization,  and  the  supreme  good  is  the  maximum 
organic  unity  or  harmony  of  personal  life  functioning  in  a  diver- 
sity of  activities.  Now,  it  is  at  once  the  supreme  paradox  and  the 
inescapable  law  of  ethical  personality  that  it  finds  the  highest 
values  of  life  in  devotion  to  over-individual  ends,  whether  in  the 
promotion  of  the  immediate  welfare  of  other  persons  or  of  more 
impersonal  forms  of  life,  such  as  science,  art,  industry,  the  state, 
the  church,  the  local  community. 

In  such  cases  the  realization  of  an  intrinsic  good  involves  the 
transcendence,  in  action,  by  the  individual  of  his  present  exis- 
tential state,  and,  in  this  act  of  self-transcendence,  the  immanent 
presence  in  him  of  a  rational  or  universal  spirit. 

Ethics  must,  on  the  one  hand,  recognize  the  unique  significance 
of  the  person  as  the  source  of  ideal  valuations  and  of  action  in 
harmony  with  such  valuations ;  on  the  other  hand,  ethics  must  take 
account  of  the  social  institutions  or  culture  forms,  which  are 
created  and  modified  by  the  historical  activity  of  persons,  and 
through  which  these  attain  rational  self-consciousness.  The 
rational  life  of  selves  is  bipolar — at  once  individual  and  social,  in 
ever  varying  relations  and  proportions.  The  ethical  life  is  not 
a  special  department  of  the  growth  of  personality.  It  is  the  whole 
development  of  personality  in  relation  with  the  historical  moral 
institutions  of  family  and  society,  state  and  religion,  science  and 
art. 

The  highest  good  is  definable  only  in  very  general  terms  as  the 
greatest  possible  harmony  of  intrinsic  personal  and  interpersonal 
goods  or  values ;  and  intrinsic  goods  we  have  already  discovered  to 
be  manifold  and  various.  Any  disposition  or  activity  which  em- 
bodies or  promotes  the  functioning  of  some  intrinsic  capacity  of 
a  sentient  and  rational  self  is  ethically  good,  provided  thereby  some 
more  worthful  quality  is  not  injured  or  thwarted.  What  specific 
quality  or  capacity  of  a  person  shall  be  judged  more  worthful, 
when  the  simultaneous  functioning  of  two  or  more  tendencies  is 
incompatible,  can  only  be  determined  empirically  with  reference 


424  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

to  the  concrete  and  individual  case.  The  only  general  criterion 
that  can  be  set  up  is  that  of  the  greatest  possible  harmony,  or 
balance  and  proportion,  consistent  with  the  least  possible  suppres- 
sion or  destruction  of  any  integral  personal  capacity,  and  with  the 
dominance  of  the  universal  or  rational  values  of  living.  The 
ethical  good  is  far  from  being  always  identical  with  empirical  and 
obvious  social  good.  For  example,  mutual  personal  service  and 
intercourse,  civic  cooperation  and  social  peace  are  ethical  goods; 
but  the  sesthetic  and  scientific  culture  of  the  individual,  his  critical 
freedom  and  independence  of  mind,  in  short,  individual  self- 
reliance  in  judgment  and  action,  are  equally  ethical  goods.  In 
ages  like  our  own,  inner  self-possession  and  poise,  and  the  intellec- 
tual power  critically  to  preserve  independence  of  thought  in  the 
face  of  the  blind  tendencies  of  the  social  mass,  seem  particularly 
important  ethical  goods. 

Ethical  values  are  affirmations  of  an  ideal  selfhood — a  spiritual 
individual  whose  fundamental  capacities  get  full  play,  whose 
action  is  reflectively  or  rationally  autonomous,  not  blindly  and 
chaotically  impulsive;  whose  active  tendencies  work  together 
toward  fuller  and  richer  harmony  of  insight  and  feeling.  In 
specific  cases  the  fullness  of  activity  and  harmony  of  feeling  sought 
may  have  primary  reference  to  the  self's  own  internal  functioning, 
to  the  harmony  of  its  physical  and  psychical  natures,  to  the  like 
condition  in  other  selves ;  or  to  the  emotional  and  active  relations 
between  the  self  and  other  selves.  In  its  more  comprehensive 
ethical  insights  and  deeds,  the  self  transcends  all  these  partial 
forms  of  moral  action  and  feeling.  It  sees  and  affirms  the  rela- 
tion of  these  partial  ends  as  contributory  to  a  more  universal  or 
ideal  interpersonal  experience,  to  fullness  of  action  and  balance  of 
feeling  in  a  harmonious  totality  which  overcomes  the  oppositions 
of  ego  and  alter.  It  is  in  obedience  to  overindividual  ends  or 
universal  values  that  the  personal  life  attains  self-realization. 

The  moral  person  is  more  than  a  socialized  individual.  No 
one  has  attained  full  consciousness  of  personality,  as  the  standard 
of  ethical  values,  who  has  not  passed  beyond  the  demands  of  con- 
ventional social  requirements  in  his  moral  insight.  Even  the 
principle  of  personal  service  of  one's  fellows,  ennobling  though  it 
be,  is  of  fullest  value  only  when  the  self  who  serves  recognizes  that 
moral  selfhood  requires  the  independent  adventure  of  serving  with 
his  unique  individuality.     If  the  final  principle  of  ethical  valua- 


ETHICAL  VALUES  425 

tion  be  the  harmonious  development  and  energizing  of  personal 
capacities  to  think  and  feel  and  do,  this  end  can  be  served  in 
society  only  by  him  who  has  found  himself  as  a  self-determining 
and  self-transcending  or  progressing  person,  and  who  sees  and 
serves  the  vision  of  an  ideal  society  of  selves,  in  which  the  universal 
values  of  justice,  self-control,  rational  insight,  wisdom  and  love 
are  incarnated.  The  moral  self  is  more  than  social,  otherwise 
society  would  never  rise  to  higher  levels.  Moral  personality  is  a 
creative  principle,  by  virtue  of  which  the  individual  is  able  to  go 
beyond  what  he  actually  is  or  what  other  selves  actually  are. 
Moral  personality  is  a  spiritual  possibility  of  progress,  an  ideal 
that  is  more  real  and  effective  than  the  actual,  an  "ought  to  be" 
that  breaks  and  remakes  the  "is,"  a  dream  which  shatters  and 
reshapes  the  brute  facts  of  the  sensuous  and  conventional  life. 
This  paradox  of  the  ethical  life  carries  us  beyond  actual  morality 
to  the  metaphysical  implications  of  moral  selfhood.  It  implies  the 
recognition  in  the  empirical  individual  of  a  spiritual  power  of 
action  that  transcends  the  actual  state  of  the  individual  life  and 
the  actual  moral  status  of  society.  The  life  of  ethical  striving 
makes  men  members  of  a  metahistorical  order  of  reality.  The 
perfected  self  which  ought  to  be  and  can  be,  but  which  is  not  yet 
empirical  fact,  is  a  selfhood  that  belongs  to  a  transcendent  rational 
and  spiritual  order  which  is  nevertheless  immanent  in  the  actual 
order.  Kant  was  right  in  his  insight  that  the  moral  self  as  the 
free  servant  of  duty,  the  inner  law  of  practical  reason,  is  a  member 
of  the  intelligible  or  noumenal  order  of  reality.  Here,  at  the 
limits  of  the  actual,  the  moral  self  finds  itself  en  rapport  with  a 
deeper  order  of  reality  and  one  which  holds  the  key  to  the  final 
meaning  of  personality. 

The  self,  to  be  truly  moral,  must  be  more  than  moral.  It  must 
pass  beyond  the  oppositions  of  good  and  bad,  of  ideal  and  actual, 
to  find  and  live  in  the  ultimate  spiritual  reality  which  enables  the 
good  to  transform  the  bad,  the  ideal  to  control  the  actual. 

The  full  interpretation  of  the  meaning  of  moral  personality 
thus  brings  us  to  the  portals  of  religion  and  metaphysics. 

The  moral  attitude  in  man  is  one  of  striving  towards  a  state  of 
perfection,  of  seeking  the  far  country  of  the  spirit.  This  attitude 
involves,  at  once,  a  consciousness  of  the  goal  of  moral  endeavor,  a 
consciousness  of  the  gap  between  the  personal  will  and  the  goal  it 
seeks,  and  the  persistent  resolve  to  cross  that  gap.    Now,  the  whole 


426  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

seriousness  and  significance  of  the  moral  life  in  man  rests  on  the 
faith  latent  in  it,  not  only  that  the  goal  can  be  attained,  not  only 
that  the  breach  between  the  "is"  and  the  "ought-to-be"  can  be 
healed ;  but  that  it  is  already  healed,  that  the  good  is  the  supreme 
reality,  that  the  "ought-to-be"  now  and  eternally  "is." 

In  short  the  moral  attitude  in  man  strives  for  a  conclusion 
which,  when  reached,  would  be  its  own  euthanasia,  and,  moreover, 
presupposes  that  this  conclusion  is  already  somehow  somewhere 
reached.  The  moral  point  of  view,  then,  cannot  be  final.  Perfect 
goodness  can  be  realized  only  in  a  spiritual  state  which  goes 
beyond  it.  In  this  respect  the  religious  attitude  is  the  full  fruition 
of  the  moral  attitude.  The  religious  attitude  presupposes,  not 
only  that  the  morally  good  will  be  achieved,  but  that  it  already 
rules  in  the  universe  at  large ;  not  only  that  the  right  will  prevail 
but  that  it  must  and  does  now  prevail,  all  appearances  to  the  con- 
trary notwithstanding.  And,  in  religious  experience,  in  faith  and 
communion  with  God,  the  individual  feels  himself  to  be  in  contact 
with,  and  in  very  possession  of,  this  ultimate  spiritual  reality  for 
which  the  good  is  no  longer  a  far-off  divine  event  but  a  present  and 
ever-abiding  reality.  Nevertheless,  while  the  religious  attitude 
transcends  and  completes  the  moral  attitude  it  does  not  do  so  by 
abolishing,. the  latter;  rather  the  religious  attitude  absorbs  into 
itself  the  moral  attitude.  The  ethical  will  passes  into  its  fruition 
only  as  it  is  taken  up  into  the  experience  of  supermoral  perfection. 
The  faith  in  the  supremacy  of  the  moral  ideal,  the  conviction  that 
the  "ought-to-be"  really  "is,"  does  not  render  the  moral  activity  of 
the  finite  self  of  no  effect.  All  that  this  faith  need  imply,  from  the 
ethical  point  of  view,  is  that,  in  his  moral  activities,  man  is  work- 
ing in  harmony  with  the  supreme  cosmic  meaning.  This  is  the 
expression  of  the  insight  that  a  life  which  has  lived  through  and 
transcended  its  moral  struggle,  is  a  richer,  more  self-complete  form 
of  goodness  than  one  still  immersed  in  the  struggle,  still  fighting  with 
uncertain  issue.  In  communion  with  the  highest  good  man  tran- 
scends the  moral  point  of  view.  Keligion  means,  in  its  highest 
forms,  the  conviction  of  the  final  conservation  of  personal  values 
in  a  harmonious  experience  in  which  the  "ought-to-be"  no  longer 
is  the  controlling  principle,  since  what  ought  to  be  is  transcended 
and  fulfilled  in  what  is.  The  ultimate  reality,  which  the  moral 
agent  and  the  philosopher  seek,  is  found  as  immediate  spiritual 
experience  in  all  genuine  and  spiritual  religion. 


CHAPTER  XXXI 


FEELING  AND  VALUES 


All  feeling  is  either  incipient  or  completed  action.    No  sharp 
line  of  demarcation  can  be  drawn  between  affection  and  conation, 
feeling  and  will.     Volition  is  incited  by  affection.     The  raw  ma- 
terials   of    action    consist    of    the    primal    feeling-impulses — the 
instincts  and  desires,  and  the  subjective  terminus  of  action  is  always 
an  immediate  feeling-state  or  affection,  in  which  consciousness  is 
suffused  with  satisfaction  or  rent  by  dissatisfaction,  according  as 
action  has  proved  successful  or  the  reverse.     In  the  life  history 
of  the  individual  and  the  race  the  emotional  and  appetitive  tenden- 
cies antedate,  in  their  manifestations,  the  specifically  intellectual, 
and  in  the  purposive  activities  of  intelligent  life  the  intellectual 
element  is  continually  being  made  subservient  to  emotion.    Feeling 
or  affection  is,  preeminently,  the  individuating  factor  of  conscious- 
ness.    The  primacy  and  uniqueness  of  the  self  is  primarily  that  of 
a  felt  unity,  not  a  reflectively  cognized  unity.    Whereas  perception 
and  reasoning  are  regarded  as  shared  and  public  processes  (of  ex- 
perience),  emotion — and,   indeed,   all  affection — is  private,  un- 
shared, exclusive.    You  and  I  may  agree  that  we  perceive  the  same 
beautiful  maiden,  but  I  can  never  agree  that  our  love  for  her  is  the 
same.     My  felt  aspirations  after  knowledge  or  fame  are  my  own 
private  experiences.     The  individual's  affections  and  emotions  are 
the  matrix  of  his  consciousness  of  selfhood.     Moreover,  besides 
their  individuating  function  in  their  centers  of  origin,  the  ele- 
mental emotions   are  individuating  and  exclusive  in  reference. 
The  object  of  the  emotional  reaction  is  always  individualized.    No 
one  fears,  hates,  loves,  or  envies  things  in  general.     One  fears, 
hates,  loves,  or  desires  always  a  particular  thing  or  person.     The 
object  of  emotion  is  the  object  of  an  exclusive  interest.    We  shall 
see,  however,  that  the  affectional  life  is  also  capable  of  generaliza- 
tion and  that  the  "sentiments"  may  be  regarded  as  generalized 
emotional  tendencies.     The  emotional  life  takes  on  ideal  values, 

427 


428  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

it  acquires  social  value  and  meaning,  just  in  so  far  as  it  is  sub- 
limated and  transformed  into  rational  attitudes.  Indeed,  the  sense 
of  general  values  attributed  to  objects  of  direct  experience  or  of 
idealizing  thought  is,  perhaps,  the  most  striking  case  of  emotional 
Generalization.  Just  as  the  "concept"  is  the  "percept"  generalized 
by  the  activity  of  reason,  so  the  "sentiment"  is  the  emotion  univer- 
salized by  reason.  Predication  through  sentiments  or  judgments 
of  feeling  are  the  ultimate  sources  of  those  appreciations,  or 
affirmations  of  value,  by  which  experience  finds  its  final  appraisal 
and  meaning  for  personality.  The  history  of  the  felt  valuations 
that  are  expressed  in  the  lives  of  individuals,  societies,  and  culture- 
systems  may  be  traced  out,  and  one  may  find  a  logic  or  rationale 
in  the  evolution  of  these  emotional  appraisals;  but,  in  the  last 
resort,  for  the  individuals,  societies,  and  cultures  in  question,  the 
appeal  in  regard  to  the  relative  values  of  activities,,  whether  per- 
taining to  scientific,  moral  and  legal,  religious,  or  aesthetic  affairs, 
or  to  the  intimately  personal  matters  of  sex  and  family,  is  always 
an  appeal  to  judgments  of  sentiment  or  feeling.1 

Affection  or  feeling  is  always  the  reference  of  some  psychical 
content — for  instance,  a  plan  of  action,  an  idea  of  past  action  or  of 
a  future  state  of  the  self,  in  some  practical  and  social  or  contem- 
plative relation — to  the  immediate  unity  of  the  self's  life,  and  this 
reference  is  always  accompanied  by  pleasure  or  pain,  harmony  or 
discord.2  But  feeling  is  far  from  being  solely  a  matter  of  pleasant- 
ness and  painfulness,  although  pleasure  and  pain  are  its  most 
generic  attributes.  Pleasantness  and  unpleasantness  of  feelings 
differ  qualitatively  at  various  levels  of  psychic  development. 
There  is  a  wide  range  of  qualitative  diversity,  from  the  sensuous 
pleasures  of  mere  touch  to  the  ideal  pleasures  of  logical  reasoning, 
moral  heroism,  or  philosophical  speculation.  For  example,  the 
sensuous  pleasure  of  eating  plum-pudding  and  the  ideal  pleasure 
of  reading  Matthew  Arnold's  poetry  are  so  different  qualitatively 
as  to  be  incomparable.  The  qualitative  differences  in  feeling  and, 
hence,  in  pleasantness  and  unpleasantness,  are  dependent  on  the 
specific  differences  of  psychic  contents  and  activities,  as  these  are 


*In  the  present  work  the  term  "feeling"  is  always  used  as  equivalent  to 
1 '  affective  consciousness. ' ' 

2 ' '  Feelings  are  immediately  experienced  qualities  or  determinations  of  the 
ego.  They  are  consequently  absolutely  subjective."  Th.  Lipps,  Leitfaden  der 
Psychologie,  pp.  16,  17. 


FEELING  AND  VALUES  429 

experienced  in  their  relations  to  the  unity  of  the  self.  I  desire  to 
act  in  a  certain  way — it  may  be  to  lead  a  dance  or  to  lead  a  political 
party.  My  situation  develops  in  such  a  manner  that  the  thought 
contents  presented  in  my  mind  engender  the  feeling  of  the  actual 
failure  or  success  of  my  desire  and  plan.  In  such  a  case  the 
reaction  of  the  self  as  a  unique  feeling  center  carries  with  it  a 
pleasure  or  pain  distinct  in  quality  from  that  which  would  follow 
on  my  success  or  failure  in  getting  invited  to  a  fine  dinner  or  in 
writing  this  chapter.  Each  activity  or  thought-content  gets  its 
own  specific  emotional  coloring  in  relation  to  the  massive  central 
feeling  reaction.  Feeling  is  a  function  of  two  variables,  the 
specific  ideational  and  motor  content  of  consciousness,  and  the 
unique  emotional  selfhood  which  has  these  contents.  The  presenta- 
tional and  reflective  contents  of  personal  feeling  include,  of  course, 
a  vast  range  of  experiences — organic  sensations  of  many  sorts,  such 
as  visceral  and  thoracic  sensations,  sensations  of  strain,  tension, 
trembling,  coldness,  hotness,  etc.  We  are  not  concerned  here  with 
psychological  analysis  or  physiological  explanation  of  emotions. 
From  our  present  standpoint,  the  affectional  or  feeling  qualities, 
which  color  these  psychic  contents,  are  the  emotional  reactions  of 
the  self.  By  these  reactions  the  self  suffuses  its  presented  contents 
with  appreciations  and  values.  These  emotional  reactions  express 
and  differentiate  individualities.  One  man  carries  out  the  train 
of  activities  involved  in  angling  with  the  fly  in  a  cool,  deliberate 
fashion.  His  emotional  reaction  may  be  deep,  but  it  is  placid,  or 
its  exuberance  is  held  in  reserve  until  the  "game"  is  over.  Another 
explodes  emotionally  with  every  variation  in  his  angling  fortunes. 
In  a  similar  fashion,  intellectual  contents  or  "ideas,"  are 
presentations  or  psychic  facts  to  which  the  self  as  central  mass  of 
feeling  reacts.  The  ideas  are  colored,  shot  through,  sometimes 
even  completely  suffused  and  transformed,  by  the  emotional  re- 
action of  the  self.  In  this  case,  just  as  in  the  case  of  overt  action, 
the  intimate  and  immediate  meanings,  values,  or  appreciations, 
which  ideas  get,  arise  in  the  central  self-feeling,  and  the  differences 
in  degree  and  kind  of  the  emotional  response  which  different  indi- 
viduals make  to  presented  ideas  notoriously  vary,  as  every  ob- 
servant teacher  knows  well.  When  the  psychic  content  in  idea  or 
movement  is  one's  own,  and  is  felt  as  such,  it  is  suffused  with  feel- 
ing of  some  sort  and  degree,  and  the  sort  and  degree  of  feeling  is 
the  index  of  one's  emotional  individuality. 


430  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

When  the  element  of  reflective  consciousness  is  absent  from 
them  the  emotional  conative  tendencies  of  the  self  are  simple  im- 
pulses and  instincts.  Impulse  is  a  single  congenital  tendency,  and 
instinct  a  train  of  congenital  tendencies,  to  act  without  conscious 
purpose  or  foresight.  In  the  development  of  the  self's  affective 
life,  thought  reacts  upon  and  modifies  the  elemental  feeling- 
impulses,  instincts,  and  desires.  At  the  more  reflective  levels  of 
personal  life,  overt  action  and  trains  of  thought  are  incited,  im- 
pelled, and  accompanied  by  feelings  or  emotional  states  more 
complex,  more  generalized,  and  more  stable  than  the  rudimentary 
impulses  and  instincts.  Under  the  influence  and  direction  of  re- 
flective thinking,  the  elemental  feeling-impulses  and  desires 
become  more  articulated  and  harmoniously  organized.  Through 
inhibition,  organization,  and  reflective  enlargement,  they  are  trans- 
formed into  more  permanent  intellectualized  emotional  disposi- 
tions. These  idealized  and  organized  emotional  tendencies  we 
have  called  "sentiments."  Their  development  can  be  illustrated  in 
the  growth  of  any  feeling.  Sexual  impulse  and  crude  emotion,  for 
example,  becomes  transformed  into  romantic  love  and  enduring 
passion  for  an  individual.  Curiosity  becomes  the  stable  sentiment 
of  wonder,  the  animating  spirit  of  scientist  and  philosopher. 
Mere  "organic"  sympathy  becomes  the  habitual  and  intelligent 
attitude  of  the  enlightened  philanthropist  and  social  worker,  the 
religious  emotion  of  fear  is  transformed  into  reverence  and  ador- 
ation. 

At  the  highest  stage,  no  less  than  at  the  crudest,  human  action 
is  incited  and  impelled  by  feeling ;  at  the  crudest  by  mere  impulse 
and  appetite,  at  the  highest  by  ideal  sentiments.  At  first  the  goal 
of  action  is  sensuous  satisfaction,  at  the  last  it  is  the  harmonious 
and  highly  organized  emotional  experiences  of  love,  friendship, 
fellowship,  delight  in  the  discovery  or  possession  of  truth,  the 
joy  of  communion  with  God,  the  pleasure  of  beauty. 

All  along  the  line  feeling  is  fundamental  in  the  self.  The 
primary  sense  of  the  unity  of  selfhood  is  in  feeling.  The  basic 
relation  to  other  selves  (sympathy  or  antipathy)  is  a  feeling  atti- 
tude. Every  kind  of  activity  is  incited  by  feeling  and  finds  its 
fruition  in  feeling.  We  are  in  quest  of  insight  into  the  nature 
of  self  as  rational  personality.  We  shall,  therefore,  consider  only 
those  types  of  feeling  which  seem  likely  to  shed  most  light  on  our 
object.     These  are  aesthetic  emotions,  and  inter-personal  emotions. 


FEELING  AND   VALUES  431 

^Esthetic  feeling  is  particularly  significant,  for  it  is,  par  excel- 
lence, an  intellectualized  and  organized  emotion  or  sentiment, 
and  is  at  once  personal  and  impersonal,  individuating  and  uni- 
versal. While  all  emotion  is  individuating,  in  the  sense  that  it 
is  the  expression  of  the  individuality  of  the  subject  and  refers 
to  an  individualized  object,  aesthetic  feeling  is  not  individualistic, 
since  it  is  devoid  of  self-consciousness  or  deliberate  self-seeking. 
The  sentiment  of  beauty  aroused  by  a  specific  object  may  be 
highly  individualized,  inasmuch  as  the  beautiful  object  possesses 
a  high  degree  of  individuality;  but  the  sentiment  itself  is  the 
reverse  of  individualistic.    It  is,  rather,  selfless  in  its  tone. 

^Esthetic  feeling,  at  its  highest  level,  is  the  reference  of  an 
intrinsic  or  immediate  value  to  certain  experienced  objects.  It 
is  this  judgment  of  intrinsic  value  which  concerns  us  in  our 
inquiry  as  to  the  significance  of  feeling  for  a  philosophy  of  per- 
sonality. 

At  once  there  arises  the  need  for  distinguishing  between  the 
concrete  aesthetic  emotion,  that  is,  the  individual's  pleasure  in 
enjoying  beauty,  and  the  aesthetic  appreciation  or  judgment  of 
aesthetic  value  involved  in  it.3  Our  actual  aesthetic  pleasures  in- 
clude nonaesthetic  factors  of  purely  sensuous  origin.  An  aesthetic 
emotion  always  is  pleasurable,  but  by  no  means  all  pleasures  are 
aesthetic. 

In  our  concrete  emotional  experiences,  aesthetic  and  non- 
aesthetic  pleasures  may  be  variously  commingled.  The  pleasure 
with  which  I  view  an  artistically  arranged  dinner  table  is  a  fusion 
of  a  genuine  aesthetic  sentiment  with  anticipated  gastronomic 
delights.  Romantic  love  contains  an  aesthetic  element,  but  its 
pleasureableness  is  also  in  part  of  purely  sexual  origin.4  The 
attempt  to  separate  the  nonaesthetic  from  the  aesthetic  factors  in 
an  experience  which  is  qualified  by  the  feeling  of  beauty  is  with- 
out doubt  a  difficult  undertaking.  Are  pleasures  of  pure  sensation 
to  be  regarded  as  devoid  of  all  aesthetic  quality?  Is  my  delight 
in  the  greenness  of  a  field  or  the  cheerful  warmth  of  the  firelight 
unaesthetic?  When  the  beloved  appears  beautiful  only  to  the 
lover  is  the  feeling  of  beauty  nonaesthetic  or  does  sexual  attrac- 
tion create  the  illusion  of  beauty?     It  seems  to  the  writer  that, 


*  On  this  distinction  see  Groos,  K.,  Der  Msthetisclie  Gertuss. 
4  So  strong  is  this  factor  in  so-called  aesthetic  pleasures  that  some  thinkers 
have  been  led  by  it  to  trace    all  aesthetic  feeling  to  a  purely  sexual  origin. 


432  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

while  a  sensuous  basis  is  required  for  aesthetic  emotion,  sensa- 
tion per  se  is  not  aesthetic.  If  the  green  field  is  beautiful  it  is 
because  it  means  more  than  greenness.  The  beloved  one  is  beauti- 
ful because  the  lover's  emotion  is  more  than  mere  lust.  The  lover 
is  transformed  into  a  selfless  devotee  by  the  very  sentiment  which 
transfigures  the  object  of  his  devotion. 

It  is  this  mixed  and  varying  composition  of  so-called  aesthetic 
emotions  that  is  responsible  for  the  proverb,  "Be  gustibus  non 
disputandum."  The  tastes  which  vary  most  widely  are  probably 
the  nonaesthetic  sensory  factors.  The  aesthetic  factors  of  form — 
measure  and  proportion,  organic  unity-in-variety  or  individual 
wholeness,  rhythm,  etc. — are  the  objective  or  shareable  factors 
in  aesthetic  pleasures.  The  common  recognition  that  there  are 
standards  of  good  taste,  however  difficult  to  define,  is  an  implicit 
admission  of  aesthetic  objectivity.  The  actual  existence  of  beauti- 
ful, picturesque,  sublime  and  tragic  objects  of  enjoyment  is  recog- 
nized. This  recognition  implies  a  certain  kind  of  reality  in  aes- 
thetic objects.  What,  then,  is  the  objective  or  universally  signifi- 
cant factor  in  the  aesthetic  emotion  ? 

The  objective  factor  in  aesthetic  emotion  can  be  determined 
only  through  an  examination  of  the  aesthetic  judgment  itself. 
Beautiful  objects  are  regarded  as  self-existent  and  socially  share- 
able objects. 

Since  we  are  not  dealing  with  the  psychology  of  beauty  here, 
we  ask,  not  why  are  certain  objects  felt  to  be  beautiful,  but,  what 
kind  of  judgments  are  implied  in  aesthetic  feelings,  and  what  is 
their  meaning  for  personality?  ^Esthetic  pleasure  is  differenti- 
ated from  nonaesthetic  pleasure  by  its  disinterestedness  and  po- 
tential objectivity  or  universality.  The  latter  is  a  note  of  all 
aesthetic  enjoyment.  As  Kant  rightly  saw,  enjoyment  of  beauty 
is  a  disinterested  pleasure,  a  selfless  and  shareable  emotion. 
Hence  the  self  attributes  the  quality  of  beauty  to  the  object,  not 
to  himself.  In  this  feature  of  aesthetic  feeling  lies  the  first  ground 
for  the  objectivity  of  aesthetic  judgment.  The  normal  attitude  of 
the  observer  is  expressed  not  thus,  "I  feel  beauty,"  but  thus, 
:'The  thing  is  beautiful."  Hence  the  felt  beauty  is  conceived  to 
be  shareable  and  social,  and  beautiful  objects  are  forms  for  the 
social  expression  of  emotions.  Beauty  resides  in  the  expression 
of  a  feeling  in  sensuous  objects,  not  in  purely  subjective  feeling. 
On  the  other  hand,  the  object  qualified  as  beautiful  is  always 


FEELING  AND   VALUES  433 

individual.  ^Esthetic  appreciation  is  intuitive  or  perceptive.  One 
may  come  to  enjoy  Wagner's  operas  or  Botticelli's  paintings  or 
Browning's  poetry  the  more  as  a  result  of  study  and  reflection. 
Nevertheless,  the  aesthetic  appreciation  of  these  art  forms  is,  as 
direct  experience,  always  intuitive  or  immediate  and  nonratioc- 
inative.  Reason  may  enter  into  it,  but  aesthetic  feeling  is  the 
concrete  intuition  of  an  individual  whole.  The  aesthetic  intui- 
tion shares  with  truth  and  goodness  the  quality  of  having  intrinsic 
or  immanent  value.  "Beauty  is  its  own  excuse  for  being."  "The 
beautiful  is  the  self -existent  pleasant."  (F.  H.  Bradley.)  Beauty, 
truth,  goodness,  love,  fellowship  with  God,  seem  to  be  the  chief 
types  of  intrinsic  spiritual  values  found  in  feeling.  These  values 
interpenetrate  and  share  in  one  another's  nature.  Mankind  has 
recognized  the  beauty  of  goodness  in  character,  the  beauty  of 
holiness,  and  even  the  beauty  of  truth.  Again  there  is  believed 
to  be  a  truth  in  beauty,  in  goodness,  and  in  religious  communion. 
The  aesthetic  judgment,  in  particular,  implies  that  there  is  truth 
in  aesthetic  emotion. 


CHAPTER  XXXII 

THE    INTERRELATIONSHIPS    OF    VALUES 

It  will  further  our  present  aim  to  examine  briefly  the  rela- 
tions between  the  values  of  beauty,  truth,  and  goodness.  The 
beauty  which  we  attribute  to  truth  seems  to  be  due  to  an  intel- 
lectual pleasure  which  arises  through  the  discovery  of  harmony 
and  proportion  in  the  elements  of  a  thought  process,  and  in  its 
outcome,  viewed  as  an  individual  whole.  When  the  movement  of 
reason  proceeds  with  order  and  symmetry  to  a  balanced  totality 
of  insight,  as  in  a  mathematical  theorem,  the  process  and  the 
result  give  aesthetic  pleasure,  because  the  harmony  and  consistency 
of  the  factors  justify  the  whole.  A  bare  abstract  principle  or 
law  is  not  beautiful,  but  a  group  of  concrete  facts,  or  of  more 
particular  truths,  seen  in  the  light  of  a  unifying  and  organizing 
principle  becomes  beautiful  in  its  unity.  The  vision  of  unity-in- 
variety,  that  is  of  concrete  individuality,  gives  rise  to  aesthetic 
feeling.  Nevertheless,  there  is  a  contrast  between  the  beauties 
of  knowledge  and  the  purely  aesthetic  beauty.  For  the  systematic 
and  harmonious  whole  of  knowledge  is  never  present  as  a  single 
intuition.  It  remains  an  ideal.  Knowledge  is  always  ragged  at 
the  edges.  It  promises  more  than  it  performs.  The  single  truth 
or  group  of  truths  always  point  beyond  to  an  uncompleted  system 
of  truth.1  The  emotional  value  of  truth  is  never  more  than 
partial  and  promissory.  The  actual  attained  truth  ever  points  to 
its  own  self-transcendence  in  the  unattained  reflective  grasp  of 
reality  as  a  harmonious  totality.  The  object  of  aesthetic  feeling, 
on  the  other  hand,  for  example,  Shakespeare's  Tempest,  Shelley's 
Skylark,  or  Keats'  Ode  to  a  Gercian  Urn,  has  an  individual  self- 
completeness  and  self-sufficiency.  In  this  nearer  approach  to  self- 
complete  individuality  consists  the  greater  emotional  fullness  of 
aesthetic  feeling  over  that  accompanying  a  theoretical  cognition. 

1  This  idea  is  the  source  of  the  philosopher 's  quest  for  the  vision  of  the 
whole   in   thought. 

434 


THE  INTERRELATIONSHIPS  OF  VALUES  435 

The  aesthetic  object  is  more  nearly  a  self-sufficient  whole.  Simi- 
larly, the  beauty  of  goodness  consists  in  the  pleasure  due  to  the 
supermoral  harmony  of  will  and  deed,  of  ideal  and  achievement. 
Beauty  exists  in  character  only  when  the  moral  struggle  is  over.2 
It  is  only  goodness  which  has  fully  attained  the  end  for  which 
moral  obligation  exists  that  is  beautiful.  Only  the  harmonious 
will  is  beautiful.  When  the  self  has  reached  this  stage  it  has 
transcended  the  merely  moral  attitude,  and  goodness  and  beauty 
have  become  one.  They  constitute  together  a  state  of  harmonious 
perfection,  the  fulfillment  of  personality. 

The  claim  to  truth  or  objectivity  which  the  aesthetic  judgment 
makes  is  shown  in  the  recognition  of  an  obligation  on  the  part  of 
the  observer  to  conform  to  certain  standards  of  taste.  When  we 
inquire  as  to  the  source  of  these  standards  we  must  have  recourse 
again  to  personal  experience.  For  the  characteristic  of  the  beauti- 
ful object  is  that  it  yields  disinterested  pleasure.  Hence,  the  final 
criterion  of  aesthetic  valuation  cannot  be  found  in  any  definition 
of  the  aesthetic  object  as  having  an  existence  independent  of  human 
experience.  Here,  as  elsewhere,  the  last  court  of  appeal  seems  to 
be  the  experience  of  an  ideal  self.  But,  since  this  ideal  is  realized 
only  gradually  and  progressively,  and  amidst  a  great  variety  of 
individual  characteristics  and  environmental  conditions,  the  cri- 
terion of  the  aesthetic  values  and  the  significance  of  the  aesthetic 
experiences,  are  finally  determined  by  one's  notion  of  the  spiritual 
vocation  of  man,  that  is,  by  one's  conception  of  the  meaning  and 
destiny  of  personality.3  This  conception  may  be,  in  many  cases, 
only  a  latent  presupposition.  Even  thus,  it  is  the  final  determi- 
nant of  one's  aesthetic,  as  well  as  of  one's  specifically  moral,  valu- 
ations. To  the  man  who  consciously  or  unconsciously  practices 
the  theory  that  mere  sensuous  pleasure  is  the  end  of  life,  aesthetic 
valuation  ceases  to  be  aesthetic,  and  beauty  becomes  a  mere  mini- 
strant  of  pleasure.  Egoistic  hedonism  in  ethics  becomes  in 
aesthetics  the  denial  of  intrinsic  beauty.  This  degradation  of  art 
to  an  instrument  of  crass  utility  or  sensuous  indulgence  has  led 
fine  ethical  natures  such  as  Plato  and  Ruskin,  and,  still  more 
one-sidedly,  Tolstoi,  to  judge  all  art  in  direct  relation  to  its  im- 
mediate moral  efficacy.     But,  in  truth,  the  aesthetic  life  is  not 

*Cf.  Schiller's  conception  of  the  " ScMne  Seele." 

'In  this  connection  Schiller's  treatment  of  the  place  of  art  in  human  life 
remains  unsurpassed. 


436  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

subordinate  to  morality.  They  are  coordinate  aspects  of  the  vital 
unity  of  the  personal  spirit.  iEsthetic  appreciation  is  an  intrin- 
sically worthful  function  of  personality.  ^Esthetic  endeavor  and 
enjoyment  are  ethical  goods  worthy  of  pursuit  on  their  own  ac- 
count. Moreover,  as  we  have  already  noted,  aesthetic  creation  and 
appreciation  have  a  moral  side,  and  beauty  is  a  medium  through 
which  the  ideal  freedom  and  activity  of  the  human  personality  are 
expressed  in  sensuous  form.  Hence,  beauty  is  an  ethical  or  spirit- 
ual force  in  human  life.  The  creation  and  appreciation  of  beauty 
are  rooted  in  the  movement  of  persons  towards  richer  and  more 
harmonious  interpersonal  experience.  The  aesthetic  object  ex- 
presses, in  a  typical  and  significant  individual  form,  some  phase 
of  personal  experience  or  emotion.  Man  is  essentially  social  and 
must  express  in  some  fashion  his  most  inward,  full,  and  intense 
feelings.  The  artist  or  poet,  who  may  sacrifice  health  and  crea- 
ture comfort  and  live  in  poverty,  in  order  that  he  may  express  in 
sensuous  form  some  vision  or  ideal  of  beauty,  thereby  actualizes 
one  phase  of  the  higher  or  spiritual  nature  of  man.  His  efforts 
may  have  a  higher  moral  quality  and  more  worthful  ethical  con- 
sequences than  those  of  a  moral  reformer.  For,  in  the  inward 
attitudes  and  experiences  of  selves,  truth,  beauty,  love  and  good- 
ness interpenetrate  and  become  one.  There  is  a  creative  imagi- 
native quality  akin  to  the  aesthetic  quality  in  every  vital  theoretic 
and  practical  expression  of  the  spirit.  Every  expression  of  spirit- 
ual activity,  whether  in  religion,  art,  or  philosophy,  is  the  effect 
of  the  striving  of  the  individual  to  communicate  ideal  values 
through  symbols.  All  such  supreme  expressions  of  the  spirit  are 
compacted  of  the  imagination,  and,  hence,  have  an  aesthetic  char- 
acter. In  every  utterance  and  deed  the  spirit  employs  the  sense 
world  as  its  instrument  and  so  must  express  itself  in  symbolic 
pictures  and  parables. 

The  aesthetic  observer,  as  lover  of  beauty,  lives  over  in  his 
inner  experience  the  vision  and  feeling  of  the  creator  of  beauty 
in  objects.  The  beautiful  object  has  no  existence  for  him  until 
there  has  arisen  in  the  intuition  of  the  observer  a  sympathetic 
reproduction  of  the  ideal  feeling  embodied  in  the  work  of  art. 
Of  course,  this  does  not  mean  that  the  observer  must  reproduce 
exactly  the  mental  states  of  the  artist.  He  may  not  be  able  to 
relive  the  technical  steps  of  production  at  all.  But  he  must  possess 
in  some  degree  a  sympathetic  insight  into  the  artist's  meaning, 


THE  INTERRELATIONSHIPS  OF  VALUES  437 

and  be  able  to  recreate  in  bis  own  soul  in  some  measure  tbe  spirit- 
ual attitude  of  tbe  author.  ^Esthetic  enjoyment,  so  far  from 
being  a  merely  passive  reception  of  external  impressions,  is  the 
active  and  sympathetic  re-creation  in  the  soul  of  the  observer  of 
a  spiritual  experience,  through  the  medium  of  an  outer  symbol. 
In  so  far  as  the  observer  of  beauty  possesses  an  aesthetic  appre- 
ciation he  sees  into  the  soul  of  the  artist.  He  is  lifted  out  of  his 
narrow  selfhood  and  becomes  one  with  all  kindred  lovers  of 
beauty.  My  appreciation  of  beauty  in  painting,  in  poetry,  or  in 
nature,  must  always  be  uniquely  my  own;  but,  in  so  far  as  this 
aesthetic  experience  is  pure  and  free  from  low  motives,  I  am 
impelled  to  seek  for  others  to  share  it.  We  normally  desire  that 
others  shall  feel  the  pure  delights  that  we  feel  and  that  their 
eyes  shall  be  open  to  the  glories  of  our  own  visions.  ^Esthetic 
appreciation  brings  a  heightening  and  expansion  of  life.  The  self 
experiences  in  it  an  emotional  widening  and  deepening, 

Are  not  the  mountains,  waves,  and  skies  a  part 
Of  me  and  of  my  soul,  as  I  of  them? 

There  is  an  actual  muscular  and  vascular  expansion  of  the 
bodily  organism  in  aesthetic  feeling.4  There  is  a  trend  of  bodily 
uplift,  as  well  as  of  spiritual  elevation,  in  the  contemplation  of 
a  glorious  mountain  range. 

^Esthetic  feeling  is  over-individual  in  the  sense  that  through 
it  we  burst  the  bonds  of  our  narrow  empirical  individuality  and 
are  carried  out  into  a  wider  and  more  harmonious  life.  ^Esthetic 
enjoyment  liberates  us  from  the  petty  interests  of  our  everyday 
selves.  In  the  contemplation  of  beauty  and  sublimity,  whether 
in  art  or  in  nature,  we  are  freed  from  the  vulgar  and  the  com- 
monplace, from  the  inharmonious  clash  and  jar  of  actual  existence. 
We  are  taken  out  of  our  ordinary  selves  and  breathe  a  larger  and 
serener  atmosphere  of  harmony  and  freedom.  In  the  region  of 
beauty  the  ideal  is  not  divorced  from  sense-experience,  as  it  is 
in  the  regions  of  science  and  morals.  In  the  feeling  of  beauty 
ideal  and  actual  are  present  in  a  living  unity  of  experience. 
There  is  here  no  conflict  between  fact  and  ideal,  no  disharmony 
of  achievement  and  aim.    Hence  the  purity  of  aesthetic  pleasure. 

*Cf.  K.  Groos,  "Der  Aestlietische  Genuss,"  Funfte  Kapitel;  Vernon 
Lee  and  J.  Anstruther  Thomson,  Beauty  and  Ugliness. 


438  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

No  one  has  better  stated  these  characteristics  of  aesthetic  appre- 
ciation than  the  German  poet  Schiller  in  his  "Letters  on  the 
^Esthetic  Education  of  the  Human  Kace."  "Beauty  is  the  work 
of  free  contemplation.  With  it  we  step  into  the  world  of  ideas 
without  having  left  the  world  of  sense."  (25th  Letter.)  "For  Art 
is  a  daughter  of  freedom  and  from  the  necessity  of  the  spirit,  not 
from  the  needs  of  matter,  does  she  receive  her  prescriptions." 
(2d  Letter.)  "Beauty  is  Form  since  we  contemplate  it,  Life 
since  we  feel  it.  Beauty  is  at  once  our  state  and  our  deed." 
"Beauty  shows  that  passion  does  not  exclude  activity,  matter, 
form,  or  limitation  infinitude — that,  consequently  man's  inevi- 
table physical  dependence  need  not  abrogate  his  moral  freedom." 
(25th  Letter.)  The  unique  value  for  personality  of  aesthetic 
feeling  consists  in  its  living  and  self-sufficient  presentation  of  an 
ideal  and  universal  type  of  experience  in  the  concrete  harmony 
of  an  individual  whole  suffused  with  emotion.  The  feeling  of 
beauty  which  qualifies  our  intuition  of  a  painting,  a  poem,  or  a 
landscape,  seems  to  be  complete  in  itself.  It  needs  neither  justi- 
fication nor  qualification.  The  experience  is  a  whole,  at  once  in- 
dividual and  absolute,  immediate  and  self-contained.  The  feel- 
ing of  the  sublime,  on  the  other  hand,  seems  to  suggest  more  than 
it  embodies,  and  so  to  carry  the  mind  beyond  its  present  experi- 
ence. It  lacks  the  self-sufficingness  of  the  feeling  of  the  beautiful 
and  has  a  closer  kinship  with  moral  feeling.  Hence  Kant  said — 
'Two  things  move  me  to  awe  and  reverence,  the  starry  heavens 
above  me  and  the  moral  law  within  me." 

^Esthetic  feeling,  then,  is  both  individual  and  universal.  It 
is  a  single  perfect  and  immediate  experience,  carrying  its  value 
within  itself  and,  thus,  individual  and  complete.  It  unites,  in 
the  harmony  of  an  immediate  wholeness  of  feeling,  the  unity  of 
thought  and  the  variety  of  sense-experience,  which  are  every- 
where the  two  poles  of  the  personal  life.  And  the  greater  the 
purity  of  the  aesthetic  experience,  that  is,  the  more  fully  inte- 
grated it  is  as  just  a  feeling  of  beauty,  the  more  clearly  does  its 
universal  character  stand  forth  as  "disinterested"  or  selfless,  since 
it  is  the  embodiment  of  the  ideal  or  "meaning"  of  personality. 
The  aesthetic  intuition  has  a  universal  or  ideal  quality,  and  in 
aesthetic  theory  this  side  of  the  experience  has  been  designated 
the  characteristic  in  expression.  For  example,  the  drama  ex- 
presses universal  or  typical  aspects  of  personal  character.     The 


THE  INTERRELATIONSHIPS  OF  VALUES  439 

characters  are  individuals,  they  each  have  a  "local  habitation  and 
a  name,"  but  they  are  the  embodiment  of  typical  human  experi- 
ences and  situations.  Hamlet  is  the  thinker  paralyzed  by  over- 
much reflection,  in  a  situation  which  demands  action.  Faust  is 
the  typical  modern  man,  freed  from  all  moral  and  religious  tradi- 
tions and  seeking  an  absolute,  soul-satisfying  experience  of  en- 
joyment under  the  limiting  conditions  of  earthly  life. 

In  Greek  Tragedy  we  have  the  conflict  of  ethical  institutions, 
as  of  the  family  and  the  state  in  the  Antigone,  worked  out  in  indi- 
viduals. In  modern  tragedy  the  persons  who  are  the  center  of 
conflict  stand  more  for  themselves.  They  are  no  longer  merely 
the  vehicles  of  struggle  between  social  and  ethical  institutions. 
In  Macbeth:,  in  Hamlet,  in  Faust,  the  struggle  is  chiefly  inward 
and  spiritual.  The  nature  and  destiny  of  personality  is  itself  at 
stake,  torn  as  it  is  by  a  conflict  between  emotions  and  impulses 
universally  human.5  The  modern  lyric  conveys  typical  moods  of 
a  soul.  Its  note  is  personal.  In  Wagner's  music-dramas  we  have 
the  union  of  dramatic  individual  characterization  with  that 
yearning  for  a  universal  and  infinite  experience,  which  music  is 
so  well-fitted  to  express. 

The  presence  of  a  universal  or  over-individual  quality  in  a 
concrete  and  individual  intuition  is  further  illustrated  in  the 
love  for  nature — the  passion  for  the  mountains  and  the  sea  and 
the  primeval  forest.  Nature,  as  object  of  aesthetic  contemplation, 
liberates  us  from  the  insignificant  details  and  the  harassing  com- 
monplaces of  daily  life.  In  the  contemplation  of  nature  we  are 
carried  out  into  a  larger  life  by  which  our  experiences  are  enriched 
and  the  conflicting  tendencies  of  our  spirits  are  harmonized. 
And  this  life  of  nature  to  which  we  become  united  by  feeling 
is,  for  us,  conscious  and  quasi-personal.  The  nature-lover  enters 
into  intimate  and  direct  relations  with  the  spirits  of  the  moun- 
tains, the  forest  and  the  streams,  and,  so  long  as  he  remains  in 
the  attitude  of  sympathetic  appreciation,  these  spirits  are  real 
for  his  experience. 

We  are  now  in  a  position  to  determine  more  closely  the  rela- 
tive functions  of  cognition,  morality,  and  aesthetic  emotion  in  the 
organization  of  personality. 

In  theoretic  cognition  the  self  reconstructs  and  interprets,  in 

"See  A.  C.  Bradley,  "Hegel's  Theory  of  Tragedy,"  Eibbert  Journal,  Vol. 
ii,  No.  3. 


440  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

terms  of  reflective  principles,  its  universe  of  sense  experience. 
The  self  thus  reduces  chaos  to  order,  variety  to  identity,  discord 
to  harmony.  In  so  doing  the  self  is  finding  its  rational  nature 
in  the  world  and  thus,  in  its  quest  for  truth,  finding  itself  in  a 
larger  sense,  by  going  beyond  itself  as  mere  sensory  organism. 
The  function  of  cognition  is  the  organization  of  experience  in 
terms  of  reason,  which  is,  at  the  same  time,  the  organization  of 
the  rational  self,  the  fulfillment  of  the  rational  will.  This  re- 
flective organization  of  the  sense  world  is  achieved  at  a  certain 
loss.  Cognition  ever  tends  to  sublimate  the  living,  thronging 
variety  of  perceptual  experience  into  a  bloodless  unity  and  iden- 
tity, to  transform  the  world  of  dynamic  and  vital  change  into  a 
dead  and  colorless  immobility.  With  progress  in  the  organiza- 
tion of  cognition  the  gap  seems  to  widen  between  the  warm  mani- 
foldness,  intensity,  and  movement  of  living  experience  and  the 
cold  sameness,  pallidity  and  inertness  of  theory.  The  "univer- 
sals"  of  science,  divorced  from  immediate  fact,  seem  abstract  and 
unreal. 

In  moral  activity  the  individual  strives  to  bring  his  will  into 
harmony  with  the  rational  and  social  conditions  of  goodness,  and 
to  reconstruct  his  own  inner  world  of  desire  in  harmony  with 
the  ideal  rational  and  social  values  of  life.  But  here,  too,  the 
gulf  yawns  between  the  sensuous  fact  and  the  ideal  principle. 
The  deed  falls  short  of  the  aim.  The  dialectic  opposition  of  ego 
and  alter,  which  lives  within  the  self,  since  the  self  is  a  social 
being,  is  never  wholly  overcome.  Sense  cannot  be  quite  subli- 
mated into  spirit  by  moral  endeavor.  Struggle  and  opposition 
prove  to  be  ever  recurring  conditions  for  the  exercise  of  the  moral 
will.  The  beautiful  soul,  which  naturally  and  spontaneously 
utters  itself  in  action  that  is  perfectly  good,  and  whose  inner  ex- 
perience knows  no  divorce  between  aspiration  and  deed,  remains 
an  unrealized  ideal.  If  the  beautiful  soul  were  realized  fact  the 
moral  and  aesthetic  would  therein  coincide.  Sensuous  impulse  and 
ideal  aims  would  wholly  interpenetrate  and  fuse  together.  The 
contrast  between  thought  and  sense,  ideal  and  actual,  would  have 
collapsed  into  one  immediate  and  perfect  individual  whole  of 
experience  and  will.  The  values  of  truth,  goodness,  and  beauty 
would  completely  coincide. 

In  the  absence  of  such  perfect  coincidence,  the  aesthetic  intui- 
tion of  beauty,  in  nature,  art,  and  human  fellowship,  affords  to 


THE  INTERRELATIONSHIPS  OF  VALUES  441 

us,  by  way  of  concrete  experiences,  forefelt  anticipations  of  an 
ultimate  harmony  of  sensuous  existence  and  ideal  values,  of 
"nature"  and  "reason."  For  the  aesthetic  intuition  is  an  indi- 
vidual and  self-sufficing  unity  of  thought  and  immediate  feeling, 
of  mind  and  object,  of  value  and  existence.  In  it  the  discordances 
of  experience,  are,  for  the  time  being  at  least,  overcome.  The 
aesthetic  experience  is  a  self-complete  individual  whole  or  harmo- 
nious unity-in-difference.  It  is  wholly  self-contained  and  of 
purely  intrinsic  worth.  In  aesthetic  feeling  our  personalities 
are  immersed  and  fulfilled  in  impersonal  experiences.  And  these 
experiences  are  concrete  and  individual  wholes,  felt  unities  of 
the  manifold,  having  a  certain  universal  quality  or  meaning.  The 
landscape  is  a  harmonious  unity  of  field,  flower,  and  trees,  of 
hill  and  vale,  of  brook  and  bank.  The  picture  is  a  harmonious 
unity  of  colors,  forms  and  human  expressions.  The  poem  is  a 
unity  of  articulate  and  rhythmic  sounds,  feeling,  and  thought. 

In  contrast  with  theoretic  cognition,  in  which  the  single  ele- 
ment always  stands  in  a  systematic  connection,  such  as  that  of 
a  causal  interrelation  or  a  syllogism,  and  this  connection  again 
in  other  connections,  which  are  never  presented  as  an  absolute 
and  complete  system,  the  aesthetic  intuition  appears  wholly  self- 
contained  and  of  purely  intrinsic  worth.  The  value  of  the  beau- 
tiful object  lies  not  in  its  logical,  causal,  or  economic  relations 
to  some  one  or  something  else,  not  in  its  suggestion  and  demand 
of  a  completer  whole,  but  in  the  direct  and  individual  embodi- 
ment, in  this  single  and  isolated  experience,  of  the  harmony  of 
fact  and  value.  The  lovely  mountain  cataract  fringed  with  pri- 
meval forest  is  a  unity  of  form,  color,  sound,  and  movement,  an 
interplay  of  sensuous  qualities  without  purpose  or  relation  to  our 
work-a-day  strivings;  hence  we  feel  its  beauty.  In  union  with 
it  we  are  all  liberated  from  the  crass  actuality  of  making  a  living. 

By  contrast  with  the  moral  volitions  the  aesthetic  intuition 
seems  complete,  since  it  is  a  state  of  perfect  fulfillment  in  which 
there  is  no  struggle  to  reach  a  goal,  no  gap  between  will  and 
attainment.  In  the  selflessness  of  devotion  to  beauty  the  indi- 
vidual will  no  longer  wills  anything,  but  is  satisfied  and  fulfilled 
by  its  unity  with  the  object. 

Unity  of  the  manifold  or  harmony,  disinterestedness  or  self- 
lessness, and  individual  completeness  of  its  objects — such  are  the 
characteristics  of  the  aesthetic  experience.     One  other  remains  to 


442  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

be  mentioned.  The  beautiful  object  may  be  a  creation  of  art 
or  of  the  imagination,  and  need  not  stand  in  any  close  relation 
to  the  actual  world.  Beauty  need  have  nothing  to  do  with  man's 
work-a-day  purposes,  or  appetites.  The  nature  we  love  is  not  the 
nature  of  the  agriculturist  or  the  lumberman.  The  novel, 
the  drama,  or  lyric  poem,  are  not  the  stories  of  deeds  and  feelings 
of  actual  persons  whom  we  know  and  with  whose  fortunes  our 
own  are  implicated.  Even  the  "realistic"  novel,  if  a  work  of  art, 
portrays  a  drama  of  human  life  complete  in  itself  and  cut  off 
from  our  personal  entanglements.  It  is  just  this  absence  of  rela- 
tion to  and  dependence  on  the  actual  needs,  disagreeable  facts, 
and  ordered  cares  of  our  own  lives  which  gives  the  charm  to  ob- 
jects of  aesthetic  intuition.  In  them  man  is  liberated  from  the 
thraldom  of  the  work-a-day  and  commonplace  world  of  weary 
trivialities,  cares,  and  jarring  discords. 

The  aesthetic  experience,  richer  and  more  self-sufficing  than 
theoretical  cognition  and  moral  activity,  seems  to  afford  hints  of 
how,  in  a  higher  harmony  of  experience,  the  theoretical  and  prac- 
tical functions  of  personality  might  find  union  and  consummation. 
Nevertheless,  as  Hegel  said,  the  limitations  and  hindrances  im- 
posed upon  them  by  their  sensuous  materials  prevent  the  aesthetic 
objects  from  expressing  the  full  life  of  spirit.  Spirit  can  find 
and  fulfill  itself  only  through  spirit.  ^Esthetic  feeling  is  one 
specialized  form  in  which  may  be  experienced  the  unity  of  the 
ideal  and  actual,  the  harmony  of  thought  and  sense.  The  ma- 
terials of  aesthetic  expression  are  not  wholly  fluid  to  ideal  feel- 
ing. The  materials  in  which  architecture  and  sculpture  work 
offer  most  resistence  to  the  transparent  expression  of  ideas  and 
emotions.  Architecture  can  express  sublimity,  grandeur,  aspira- 
tion, even  grace,  but  it  fails  to  convey  the  complex  shades  and 
finer  moods  of  human  feeling.  Sculpture  can  convey  grace  and 
beauty  of  form,  even  struggle  and  power  and  agony  in  human 
fate,  but  only  in  arrested  immobile  shape.  It  fails  to  render  the 
dynamic  and  complex  experiences  in  the  development  of  human 
situations.  It  conveys  no  ebb  and  flow  of  emotions.  The  freest 
and  most  ideal  arts  are  poetry  and  music,  in  which  articulate 
and  significant  rhythmic  sounds  can  express  tragic  situations, 
unfold  dramatic  movements,  and  depict  evanescent  moods  of  the 
soul.  Music  seems  to  yield  the  fullest  expression  of  the  infinite 
and  the  cosmic  in  yearning,  pathos,  striving,  aspiration,  consum- 


THE  INTERRELATIONSHIPS  OF  VALUES  443 

mation  and  adoration.  But  no  single  type  of  aesthetic  expression 
is  ever  wholly  adequate  to  the  rich  complexity  of  personal  experi- 
ences, volitions  and  sentiments. 

In  the  first  place  aesthetic  expression  and  emotion  are  not 
independent  of  moral  experience.     The  harmony  of  feeling  which 
engenders  the  judgment  of  beauty  is,  indeed,  not  the  same  as 
moral  feeling.     On  the  other  hand,  the  most  significant  and  most 
permanent  types  of  aesthetic  objects — in  the  fine  arts,  literature, 
and  music — always  show  moral  proportion;  they  are  always  in 
harmony  with  the  moral  order  of  human  life.     The  greatest  art 
such  as  the  tragedies  of  Sophocles  or  Shakespeare,  Goethe's  Faust, 
or  Dante's  Divine  Comedy,  are  true  to  the  ethical  destiny  of  man 
as  a  spiritual  or  self-determining  being,  living  in  an  ethically 
ordered  Cosmos.     The  purely  aesthetic  attitude  leaves  untouched 
the  problem  of  the  relations  of  aesthetic  experience  to  reality.    And 
yet  the  highest  beauty  must  be  true  to  the  meaning  and  destiny 
of  the  spirit.     Beauty,  to  be  a  satisfying  object  of  experience, 
must  be  grounded  in  the  reality  of  the  world  order.     It  must  bear 
witness  to  the  meaning  and  destiny  of  spiritual  selfhood.     When 
we  have  said  this  we  have  raised  the  whole  question  as  to  the 
place  of  personality  in  the  cosmos.     This  ultimate  issue  I  shall 
not  discuss  at  the  present  juncture.     I  desire,  rather,  to  insist 
here  that  man  cannot  satisfy  his  spirit  with  beautiful  illusions. 
The  aesthete  who  cultivates  the  beautiful,  without  reference  to 
its  moral  proportion  and  truth,  finds  his  enjoyment  turn  to  Dead 
Sea  fruit.     A  world  of  beautiful  illusion,  however  fair,  would 
lose  its  fairness  if  it  were  wholly  out  of  harmony  with  reality. 
Indeed,  the  positive  presence  of  moral  truth  and  the  reference  to 
the  nature  of  reality  which  are  involved  in  the  ideal  significance 
of  beauty  are  clearly  indicated  by  the  over-individual  demand  for 
a  selfless  devotion,  free  from  utilitarian  taint,  which  beauty  makes 
upon  our  intelligent  wills.     In  this  respect  the  desire  for  and 
the  devotion  to  beauty  are  expressions  of  an  ideal  or  absolute 
value  which  the  personality  serves  and  realizes  just  through  the 
contemplation  and  creation  of  beauty. 

^Esthetic  values,  then,  are  not  wholly  self-sustaining.  In  art 
the  ideal  is  present  and  is  treated  as  semblance.6     The  demand 

fl  Schein  it  is  called  by  Schiller  and  von  Hartmann.  ^Esthetic  feeling  can 
approve  the  living  only  as  appearance,  the  actual  only  as  ideal.  Schiller,  26th 
Letter. 


444  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

of  the  spiritual  self  for  a  richer,  more  human  reality  can  never 
rest  satisfied  with  a  dream-world,  even  of  beauty.  When  we  are 
immersed  in  aesthetic  contemplation  we  do  not  raise  the  question 
as  to  the  reality  which  our  intuition  symbolizes;  but  when  the 
question  is  once  raised,  as  it  must  be  if  beauty  be  vital  for  the 
furtherance  of  the  spiritual  life,  the  fundamental  postulate  of 
spirit's  value  to  reality  necessitates  the  assumption  that  experi- 
ences so  integral  to  personality  as  beauty  and  sublimity  must 
symbolize  a  harmony  of  organization  that  inheres  in  the  very 
constitution  of  reality.  The  fuller  and  completer  harmony  of 
personal  consciousness  and  ultimate  reality  must  transcend  the 
merely  aesthetic  attitude.  On  the  other  hand,  the  element  of 
aesthetic  feeling  is  an  integral  factor  in  every  intrinsically  worth- 
ful  and  creative  function  of  personality.  An  aesthetic  element 
interpenetrates  all  intrinsic  personal  values.  Both  knowledge  and 
ethical  conduct  involve,  in  their  fulfillment,  aesthetic  factors.  For 
they  are  coordinate  manifestations  of  the  undying  quest  for 
harmony,  for  the  ideal  unity  of  the  manifold,  that  runs  through 
the  whole  spiritual  life.  The  goal  of  all  theoretical  and  practical 
activity  is  an  individuated  harmony  of  experience,  that  is,  of 
immediate  feeling  suffusing  a  mediated  system  in  which  the 
varied  contents  of  experience  are  taken  up  and  unified  into  a 
rational  totality.  And  so  we  find  aesthetic  sentiment  entering 
into  and  absorbed  in  the  feeling  for  nature,  in  romantic  love,  in 
friendship  and  in  religious  devotion. 

While,  then,  aesthetic  intuition  is  a  more  complete  and  indi- 
vidual whole  than  either  discursive  knowledge  or  moral  goodness, 
it  cannot  be  said  to  absorb  into  itself  and  transcend  these  essential 
factors  in  the  personal  life.  iEsthetic  intuition  does  suggest  the 
formal  nature  or  general  character  of  a  more  complete,  self-sus- 
taining and  universal  intuition  or  experience,  by  which  the  human 
spirit  may  enter  into  the  supreme  meaning  of  reality.  And  the 
lover  of  beauty  may  see  in  the  aesthetic  insight  the  suggested  out- 
lines of  a  cosmic  harmony — of  a  world  life  proceeding  from  and 
sustained  by  the  creative  intuition  of  a  Supreme  Spirit  in  whom 
truth,  goodness,  and  beauty  coincide.  In  the  most  liberal  forms 
of  religious  devotion  the  reality  of  this — the  unified  ideal  of  per- 
sonal values — is  presupposed  as  in  religious  faith  it  is  affirmed. 


THE  INTERRELATIONSHIPS  OF  VALUES  445 

The  Interpersonal  Emotions 

The  completest  fruition  of  the  feeling-life  is  found  in  inter- 
personal emotions  and  sentiments.  Sympathy,  friendship,  sexual 
and  family  love,  loyal  love  of  country  or  a  cause,  devotion  to  God, 
these  are  the  fullest,  richest,  most  self-sufficing  emotional  experi- 
ences and  attitudes  of  persons.  These  feelings  furnish  the  strong- 
est and  most  enduring  motives  to  action.  They  are  the  most  last- 
ing incitements  to  will.  And  it  is  in  these  interpersonal  emotions 
that  man  finds  his  most  satisfying  and  most  nearly  self-complete 
values.  The  unity  of  two  equal  and  noble  souls  in  a  lasting  friend- 
ship, the  lasting  harmony  of  feeling  and  will  in  the  devoted  love 
of  man  and  woman,  where  the  grace  and  delicate  fragrance  of 
the  woman  soul  is  joined  to  the  strength  and  vigor  of  the  man 
soul,  the  self-sacrificing  devotion  of  mother  to  child — such  are 
types  of  feeling  which  have  all  the  self-complete  individuality  and 
disinterestedness  of  aesthetic  experience  together  with  a  fullness 
and  a  depth  beyond  all  mere  aesthetic  emotion. 

Friendship,  love,  loyalty  and  religious  devotion  are  at  once 
the  most  universal,  the  most  highly  individualizing,  and  the  most 
self-complete  forms  of  emotional  experience  of  harmony.  They 
yield  the  most  highly  individuated  and  concrete  kind  of  knowl- 
edge— the  sympathetic  intuition  of  other  selves.  Mankind  has, 
in  calling  these  attitudes  "beautiful,"  recognized  their  kinship 
with  aesthetic  feeling.  In  these  interpersonal  emotions,  for  which 
we  may  employ  the  generic  term  "love,"  selves  are  directly  and 
immediately  unified  without  dependence  on  any  external  condi- 
tions of  union.  Love  is  the  immediate  intuition  of  spirit  in  spirit, 
of  self  in  self.  Interpersonal  emotion  is  the  completest,  concretest 
and  most  highly  individuated  experience  of  unity-in-difference, 
the  harmony  of  self  and  other  self. 

Friendship,  love,  fellowship,  religious  adoration  and  com- 
munion, are  the  most  richly  significant  and  intrinsically  worthful 
types  of  the  over-individual  unity  and  harmony  of  persons.  They 
seem  to  afford  the  fullest  adumbrations  of  an  ideally  self-com- 
plete experience.  In  love,  friendship,  and  fellowship,  the  indi- 
vidual self's  inner  world  is  expanded  and  unified  by  going  out- 
side itself  and  living  for  and  in  another  selfhood.  Hence  these 
feeling-states  seem  absolutely  worthful  and  self-existent.  They 
are  often  imperfect  and  mutable,  and  sometimes  they  seem  non- 


446  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

moral  •  nevertheless,  in  their  immediate  presence  and  possession 
change  and  imperfection  are  forgotten  and  the  person  seems  to 
find  the  perfect  and  lasting  values  of  experience.  Indeed,  these 
personal  relationships  are  all  akin  to  religious  feeling  and  religion 
is,  perhaps,  simply  personal  emotion  at  its  highest  level  of  ideal- 
ization. The  higher  emotional  states  or  sentiments — friendship, 
love,  religious  fellowship  and  adoration — do  not  involve  the  merg- 
ing of  the  persons  related  by  them  into  one  another.  In  these 
emotional  unities  persons  are  at  once  differentiated  and  united. 
These  higher  emotional  states  are  the  richest,  most  concrete,  most 
highly  personalized  experiences  of  identity-in-difference.  They 
are  most  concrete,  since,  while  they  are  states  of  personal  feeling, 
this  feeling  carries  in  its  heart  the  unique  cognition  of  another 
self,  and  from  it  there  flows  spontaneously  action  to  express  and 
maintain  the  emotion. 

In  religious  love  or  devotion  this  principle  of  the  emotional 
unity  of  opposites,  of  felt  identity-in-difference,  seems  to  hurst 
the  bonds  of  finitude  and  mutation  and  to  touch  the  perfect  and 
eternal.  Throughout  the  history  of  humanity  we  find  that  wher- 
ever man  awakens  to  even  the  most  vague  and  intermittent  con- 
sciousness of  the  psychic  bonds  which  hold  him  to  his  fellow  and 
which  constitute  the  emotional  basis  of  society,  he  affirms  the 
same  principle  in  his  relations  with  the  supreme  ideal — with  the 
God  conceived  as  the  source  and  goal  of  the  human  ideal.  Imper- 
fectly conceived,  mutable,  fruitful  of  error  and  crime  though 
they  be,  the  unifying  bonds  of  personal  emotion  are  ever  pro- 
jected into  and  clothe  in  living  form  the  ideal  of  the  eternal,  im- 
mutable, and  perfect,  as  somehow  one  with  the  temporal,  mutable, 
and  imperfect. 

Such  being,  in  general  terms,  the  place  of  feeling  in  human 
experience  and  its  function  in  the  life  of  personality,  feeling  must 
inhere  in  the  ultimate  reality.  The  universe  must  feel;  and  if 
there  be  a  universal  spirit  whose  experience  is  the  unifying  cen- 
tral life  of  the  cosmos,  this  spirit  must  feel,  in  a  manner  analogous 
to  our  feeling,  and  hence  must  be  a  self.  Only  a  self  can  feel  and 
only  a  psychic  center  which  feels  can  be  a  self.  What  are  for  us 
pleasure  and  pain,  joy  and  sorrow,  indignation,  hatred,  love,  de- 
votion, beauty,  must  somehow  enter  into  his  life.  And  we  may 
venture  to  affirm  that  the  highest,  most  abiding,  full  and  compre- 
hensive states  of  feeling  will  enter  into  the  absolute  feeling  with 


THE  INTERRELATIONSHIPS  OF  VALUES  447 

the  least  transformation.  What  sensuous  pleasures  and  pains  can 
mean  positively  for  a  cosmic  or  universal  self  it  is  impossible  to 
say ;  I  have  no  inkling  of  what  my  toothache  or  hunger  may  mean 
for  God.  But  a  noble  sorrow,  a  deep  sympathy,  a  strong  friend- 
ship, a  devoted  love,  a  persistent  devotion  to  justice  and  truth — 
such  personal  emotions  of  appreciation  that  control  action  and 
give  worth  to  living  must  have  a  very  positive  meaning  for  a 
universal  self.  While  we  must  not  forget  that  we  speak  anthropo- 
pathically  we  may  properly  assert  that,  since  human  experience 
is  our  only  basis  for,  and  human  valuation  our  highest  guide  to, 
the  interpretation  of  reality,  the  highest  and  most  abiding  human 
emotions  must  reveal  an  essential  aspect  of  the  cosmos.  Whether 
the  ultimate  reality  be  one  spirit  or  a  society  of  many  spirits,  this 
reality  must  be  a  life  of  feeling,  and  human  emotion  must  be  a 
principal  avenue  to  experiencing  ultimate  reality.  The  ultimate 
self  or  society  of  selves  must,  then,  feel  the  joys  and  sufferings 
of  finite  selves;  must  enjoy  the  beauties  and  sublimities  of  its 
universe  and  of  the  finite  elements  thereof;  must  feel,  in  some 
way,  the  loves  and  friendships  which  bind  finite  selves  into 
higher  unities.  A  universe  which  felt  no  pain  and  sorrow,  thrilled 
with  no  joy  or  beauty,  and  which  was  insensate  to  the  fellowship 
of  selves  would  be  less  than  human.  Its  experience  would  be 
much  poorer  and  less  meaningful  than  that  of  a  human  soul.  It 
is  inconceivable  that  such  a  universe  should  bring  forth  as  its 
finest  flower,  beauty,  friendship,  love,  devotion  and  admiration 
in  finite  selves,  while  in  its  own  innermost  structure  and  move- 
ment these  supreme  experiences  should  have  neither  place  nor 
meaning. 


CHAPTER  XXXIII 

MOKAL   FREEDOM 

It  is  common  in  discussions  concerning  freedom  of  action  to 
assume  that  there  is  a  special  faculty  in  man  called  the  "will/' 
and  that  it  is  this  faculty  that  is  either  free  or  bound.  Thus 
people  speak  of  training  the  will,  exercising  the  will,  using  their 
wills,  etc.  There  may  be  no  harm  in  all  this,  as  a  mode  of  popu- 
lar speech,  but  in  psychology  and  philosophy  it  is  erroneous  and 
misleading.  There  is  no  special  faculty  of  will;  the  will  is  the 
entire  self  of  the  moment,  the  whole  dynamic  complex  of  impul- 
sions, sentiments,  valuations  and  thoughts,  in  action  either  to 
achieve  a  desired  end  or  to  ward  off  an  undesired  affect.  In  brief, 
the  will  is  the  whole  self  striving  to  attain  goods  and  to  avoid  evils. 

The  concept  of  moral  freedom  must  be  distinguished  from 
that  of  social  liberty.1  A  man  may  be  morally  free  and  socially 
in  chains,  or  vice  versa.  Furthermore,  moral  freedom  is  distinct 
from  psycho-physical  freedom,  which  is  simply  the  power  to  ex- 
press one's  aims  through  the  instrumentality  of  the  body.  One 
might  be  morally  free  and  physically  bound,  through  physical 
weakness,  or  through  being  pinned  down,  for  example,  by  a  weight 
that  one  could  not  remove. 

The  problem  of  moral  freedom  involves  two  distinct  questions : 
(1)  self-determination  or  the  ability  of  the  self  as  a  unique  being 
to  will  the  ends  which  it  values;  (2)  freedom  of  choice  or 
the  power  of  the  self  to  choose  between  alternative  courses  of 
action.  The  second  question  may  be  put  thus — granting  self- 
determination,  does  it  follow  that  a  self  could  ever  have  chosen 
differently  from  what  it  did  ? 

Practical  moral  judgments,  as  expressed  in  social  responsi- 
bility, and  in  praise  and  blame,  reward  and  punishment  of  self 


1  Of  course  no  one  could  "realize"  and  enjoy  moral  freedom  as  a  slave. 

448 


MORAL  FREEDOM  449 

and  other  selves,  assume  at  the  moment  of  decision  the  power  of 
choosing,  at  least  sometimes,  between  alternative  ends  of  action. 
Unless  "the  native  hue  of  resolution  has  been  sicklied  o'er  by  the 
pale  cast  of  thought"  to  the  point  of  volitional  paralysis,  or  unless 
there  has  been  mental  and  nervous  breakdown,  men  believe  that 
they  can,  in  momentous  crises,  choose  freely  how  they  shall  act. 
Whether  Kant's  famous  argument  for  freedom,  "I  ought,  therefore 
I  can,"  be  valid  or  not,  it  is  certainly  a  true  and  pithy  expression 
of  the  attitude  of  a  healthy  moral  consciousness.  What  this  naive 
consciousness  of  freedom  really  involves  is  now  the  question. 

The  psychological  determinist  argues  that  what  I  may  choose 
to  do  at  any  instant  in  my  career  is  the  strictly  determined  and 
unavoidable  resultant  of  my  character  and  circumstances,  taken 
in  conjunction.     I  feel  that  I  am  free  in  the  degree  in  which  I 
am  able  to  express  my  selfhood  or  character  in  my  deed.     I  am 
truly  a  self-determining  and  self-directing  being,  in  the  measure 
in  which  my  actual  individuality  wins  expression.     But  at  the 
given  moment  of  choice  I  could  not  have  chosen  otherwise  than 
I  actually  did.     I  think  that  I  can  choose  between  two  or  more 
alternatives  now  before  my  mind  because,  up  to  the  instant  of 
actual  choice,  I  am  ignorant  of  many  of  the  subconscious  factors, 
in  the  shape  of  impulse  and  habit,  that  determine  the  actual  course 
of  my  decisions.     The  psychological  determinist  holds  that  our 
voluntary  actions  are  not  mechanically  determined  by  external 
physical  causes.     But  he  also  holds  that  every  actual  volition  is 
a  wholly  determined  psychical  process.     I  may  choose,  now,  with- 
out external  physical  or  social  compulsion;  but  "I,"  who  thus 
choose,  do  so  as  the  joint  resultant  of  many,  and  chiefly  unnoted, 
inherited  and  acquired  dispositions  to  act.     It  is  indeed  I  who 
choose,  but  my  choice  is  always  strictly  determined  by  my  con- 
genital nature,  modified  by  the  educational  and  environmental 
habits  and  influences  which  make  that  nature  what  it  concretely 
is  now.     And  my  original  nature  is  a  perfectly  definite  datum, 
plastic  in  a  limited  degree  to  the  molding  influences  of  the  social 
or  psychical  environment  past  and  present.     As  life  goes  on  this 
plasticity  decreases  to  the  zero  point.     "You  cannot  teach  an  old 
dog  new  tricks."     Hence,  the  belief,  at  or  before  the  moment  of 
choice,  that  I  could  ever  choose  at  will  between  two  alternatives, 
or  the  after-reflection  that  I  might  then  have  chosen  the  one  which 
I  did  not  embrace,  is  due  to  my  ignorance  of  my  nature  as  this 


450  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

displays  itself  in  the  succession  of  my  choices.  An  all-wise  psy- 
chologist could  predict  all  our  reactions  and  so-called  choices 
through  all  time,  provided  that  he  were  likewise  an  all-wise 
physicist.  Our  several  natures  may  be  unique,  in  the  sense  that 
they  are  specific  or  individual  complexes  of  psychical  factors, 
but  what  these  natures  are  they  inevitably  are,  and  what  they 
will  be  they  inevitably  will  be.  The  standpoint  of  psychology, 
as  of  any  other  special  science,  is  and  should  be  deterministic, 
but  this  standpoint  is  not  necessarily  final. 

Clearly,  then  the  problem  of  freedom  is  the  problem  of  the 
ultimate  nature  of  the  self  or  person,  and  of  its  place  in  the 
scheme  of  things.  We  are  here  simply  approaching  the  central 
problem  of  our  whole  treatise  from  a  special  angle — that  of  voli- 
tional and  moral  consciousness. 

One  conception  of  freedom  may  be  at  once  eliminated ;  namely 
that  freedom  consists  in  the  power  of  unmotivated  willing,  in  a 
capricious  and  mysterious  capacity  for  making  choices  that  have 
no  intelligible  relation  to  past  choices,  habits,  and  individual  char- 
acter.    This  is  the  so-called  freedom  of  indifference,  liberum  ar- 
bitrium  indifferentice.    According  to  this  view  in  its  extreme  form 
the  most  humane  man  might  suddenly  turn  round  and  commit 
the  wanton  cruelties  of  a  Nero  or  Caligula,  the  man  with  great- 
est power  of  self-control  or  with  a  cold  temperament  might  sud- 
denly become  an  utter  drunkard  or  debauchee,  and  this  take  place 
without  any  assignable  reason.     Such  a  conception  of  freedom  is 
both  unintelligible  and  immoral.    If  it  were  true  to  the  facts,  edu- 
cation would  be  worthless,  since  effective  moral  habits  would  be 
impossible  of  formation  and  the  volitional  life  of  man  would  be 
a  chaos.    Without  some  measure  of  continuity  and  predictability 
in  human  character  society  would  be  reduced  to  anarchy,  and 
moral  judgment,  education  and  the  administration  of  law  would 
be  without  any  firm  foundations.     This  theory  contradicts  the 
plain  facts  of  experience,  and  can  find  refuge  only  in  ignorance 
of  human  nature. 

Education,  moral  judgment,  and  the  conduct  of  the  general 
business  of  society,  all  presuppose  a  high  degree  of  stability  and 
continuity  in  human  character.  Indeed,  our  social  judgments  and 
practice,  our  contracts,  credits,  promises  and  plans,  all  assume 
that  human  conduct  is  to  a  large  extent  predictable,  when  we 
know  the  individual  to  be  a  sane  and  normal  self.     Whatever  sort 


MORAL  FREEDOM  451 

of  freedom  there  may  be,  it  must  in  any  case  be  compatible  with 
continuity  and  stability  in  character,  and  with  the  actual  fulfill- 
ment of  expectations  based  on  character. 

Furthermore,  freedom  of  choice  can  be  operative  only  within 
the  narrow  limits  set  by  one's  definite  individuality  and  determi- 
nate circumstances.  And  freedom  of  choice  is  limited  by  moral 
freedom.  A  good  man  who,  by  repeated  choices  of  the  right  al- 
ternatives, has  formed  a  strong  and  steady  habit  of  right  decision, 
is  morally  free.  We  would  hardly  say  that  such  a  one  is  a  slave 
to  virtue,  and  yet  he  is  practically  incapable  of  making  certain 
choices.  We  should  not  regard  a  God  who,  because  of  the  utter 
goodness  of  his  nature,  could  not  do  otherwise  than  always  will 
the  right  as  less  free  and  less  perfect  than  a  God  who  frequently 
willed  the  worse  when  he  might  have  willed  the  better. 

That  any  human  volition  ever  takes  place  without  adequate 
motives  may  be  dismissed  as  a  senseless  assertion.  The  spectator, 
and  even  the  agent  himself,  is  frequently  at  a  loss  to  determine 
with  any  degree  of  definiteness  the  grounds  of  volition,  but  a 
fuller  self-knowledge  will  always  disclose  them.  That  volition  is 
determined  by  the  strongest  motive  is  in  one  sense  false  and  in 
another  sense  a  platitude. 

If  by  the  "strongest  motive"  be  meant  a  force  which  pushes 
the  self  from  behind  or  without,  it  is  a  false  notion  when  applied 
to  volition.  A  desire  or  impulse  is  not  a  motive  to  voluntary  ac- 
tion until  it  has  been  identified  by  the  self  with  its  own  aims  and 
interests.  Only  when  the  self  approves  the  satisfaction  of  this 
desire  has  it  become  a  motive.  It  is  only  by  the  reflective  reac- 
tion of  the  central  principle,  which  weighs  values  and  affirms 
choices,  that  a  vague  restlessness  or  a  well-defined  impulse  becomes 
a  motive.  When  desires  conflict,  that  one  which  becomes  the 
determining  motive  is  the  desire  which  is  identified  with  the  self 
as  good.  Thus,  rightly  understood,  determination  by  the  strong- 
est motive  means  self-determination,  for  we  have  no  measure  of 
the  meaning  and  strength  of  motives  except  in  terms  of  their 
valuation  by  the  self.  Motives  are  not  like  physical  forces  which 
may  converge  from  various  directions  outside  their  common  point 
of  application  there  to  constitute  automatically  a  composite  re- 
sultant. In  voluntary  action  the  resultant,  whether  simple  or 
composite,  is  constituted  finally  by  the  reaction  of  the  entire  self. 
Even  the  subconscious  and  unconscious  tendencies,  which  influ- 


452  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

ence  decision  and  action  so  much,  have  no  close  analogy  to  external 
determination  by  physical  forces.  The  only  analogy  in  the  phys- 
ical world  to  the  volitions  of  a  rational  self  would  be  that  of  an 
individuated  center  of  force  which  maintained  itself  by  self-ad- 
justment and  reaction  in  a  variety  of  ways  to  its  environment, 
and  this  analogy  is  a  weak  one.  The  physical  principle  of  the 
conservation  of  energy  is  irrelevant  in  this  field.  A  self  is  a 
synthetic  principle  of  activity  which  has  the  power  of  forming 
new  judgments  of  value. 

The  problem  of  freedom  comes,  then,  to  this — is  the  self  in  all 
cases  an  absolutely  fixed  and  temporally  predetermined  entity  or 
not  ?  Is  human  individuality  the  arithmetical  sum  or  chemical 
fusion  of  various  psychical  and  physiological  forces,  or  is  it  a 
unique  unity  capable  of  self-determining  progress  and  alteration  ? 
All  the  freedom  that  the  moralist  needs  is  that  of  the  self  as  a 
principle  of  self-determination  and  self -development,  and  not  a 
mere  moving  point  of  trains  of  forces  converging  from  behind  and 
from  without.  In  short,  is  there  an  ultimate  spiritual  principle 
of  synthetic  judgment  in  the  empirical  ego  ?  If  we  answer  this 
question  in  the  affirmative,  then  freedom  of  choice  means  the 
power,  in  definite  critical  and  novel  situations,  to  so  evaluate  and 
determine  the  sensuous  and  physiological  factors  of  action  that 
one  thereby  makes  these  factors  the  instrumentalities  for  the  ex- 
pression and  fulfillment  of  the  higher  values  of  social  and  per- 
sonal life.  If  there  be  an  irreducible  principle  of  spiritual  indi- 
viduality in  the  self,  then  we  are  free  whenever,  and  in  the  measure 
in  which,  this  individuality  wins  expression.  This  means  a  limit 
to  the  analysis  and  explanation  of  voluntary  action — the  limit  set 
by  the  inherent  nature  of  spiritual  individuality  or  personality. 
We  may,  after  the  event,  say  that  a  heroic  moral  decision  was  the 
unavoidable  and  determinate  expression  of  the  individual's  nature, 
because,  in  our  ex  post  facto  wisdom,  we  infer  the  nature  of  indi- 
viduality from  the  acts  which  are  its  expressions  and,  indeed,  its 
effectuations.  But  we  cannot,  before  the  event,  always  determine 
with  certainty  the  limits  of  voluntary  action,  of  moral  choice,  of 
heroic  decision,  of  reformation,  conversion,  or  failure.  Doubtless 
there  must  always  be  specific  conditions  which  arouse  or  liberate 
hitherto  obstructed  spiritual  energy  in  the  self ;  the  reality  of  free- 
dom means  simply  the  power  to  put  more  of  one's  selfhood  into 
one's  choices  and  deeds;  to  value  and  determine  one's  motives  in 


MORAL  FREEDOM  453 

the  light  of  reason,  beauty,  justice,  and  love,  as  these  ideals  func- 
tion in  and  through  the  self-determining  personality. 

Man  is  morally  free,  if  his  future  is  not  wholly  and  exactly 
predetermined  by  the  past  expressions  of  his  character,  habits,  and 
environment.  Every  critical  moral  choice  must  be,  in  such  case, 
a  new  event  in  the  spiritual  world.  Character  cannot  be  a  fixed 
quantity.  It  is  rather  the  changing  and  developing  expression  or 
actualization,  in  single  deeds  and  in  habitudes  of  action,  of  the 
creative  principle  of  individuality  or  personality.  The  latter  is 
the  source  and  bearer  of  the  actual  self's  development.  A  self  is 
morally  free,  if  it  be  sufficiently  fluid  to  be  able  to  break  away, 
when  stimulated  by  favorable  influences,  from  old  habitudes  and 
to  form  new  and  better  ones  by  fresh  decisions.  There  must,  of 
course,  be  sufficient  reasons  for  every  action.  The  same  self  may 
act  wrongly  in  one  situation  and,  afterwards,  rightly  in  a  similar 
situation ;  because  new  influences  have  incited  him  to  a  revaluation 
of  his  standard  of  action,  have  altered  his  sense  of  relative  values, 
and  a  fresh  combination  of  motives  leads  to  a  novel  self-affirmation. 
We  cannot  act  contrary  to  our  natures,  but,  in  moral  development 
our  natures  are  not  rigidly  fixed  and  predetermined  quantities, 
changeable  only  from  without.  The  power  of  self-initiated  and 
self-directed  change,  of  individual  and  unique  reaction,  is  the  very 
root  of  freedom.  It  may  be,  of  course,  that  we  cannot  predict 
every  human  valuation,  choice,  and  volition,  simply  because  of  the 
vast  complexity  of  the  internal  and  external  components  of  cona- 
tion and  the  contrasting  limitations  of  our  knowledge.  On  the 
other  hand,  if  freedom  means  anything  positive,  we  could  never, 
even  with  the  most  complete  knowledge  possible  to  a  spectator, 
predict  every  choice  of  another  self;  for  the  self  contains  a 
uniquely  ultimate  principle  of  choice  or  self-determination,  which 
is  known  to  another,  and  even  to  itself  clearly  and  fully,  only  as  it 
reveals  itself  in  new  and  critical  situations.  In  short,  to  admit 
freedom  in  the  sense  of  self-determination  is  to  accept  the  ultimate 
reality  of  a  creative  principle  of  individuality  as  a  not  further 
explicable  fact  or  constituent  element  in  the  universe. 

On  the  other  hand,  it  may  be  admitted  that,  when  a  volition  is 
viewed  retrospectively,  the  antecedent  conditions  being  given  to- 
gether with  the  individual  character,  the  individual  could  not  then 
have  willed  otherwise.  For,  in  explaining  past  choices  and  actions, 
we  are  not  now  viewing  the  volitions  in  their  immediate  reality, 


454  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

and  we  could  not  so  view  them  without  ourselves  being  identical 
with  the  agent  at  the  moment  of  choice.  When  we  are  in  the  midst 
of  choosing,  our  volitions  cannot  be  said  to  be  wholly  predeter- 
mined, since  they  are  still  in  process,  not  accomplished  facts. 
Volitions  are  not  determinate  until  they  have  been  determined. 
The  explanation  of  a  choice,  a  valuation,  a  voluntary  deed,  is 
always  a  retrospective  procedure  which  fails  to  do  justice  to  the 
act  in  its  immediate  and  living  actuality  as  a  novel  or  creative 
event  in  the  spiritual  order. 

Thus,  two  stages  of  freedom  may  be  distinguished — abstract  or 
primary  freedom  and  concrete  or  realized  freedom.  By  abstract 
freedom  I  mean  the  possibility  of  reflective  valuation  and  choice, 
and  of  the  development  thereby  of  a  well-organized  individual 
character.  This  takes  place  through  the  functioning  of  the  prin- 
ciple of  rational  individuality  within  the  limits  set  by  the  con- 
genital equipment  of  instincts,  impulses,  and  other  native  capaci- 
ties, and  within  the  limits  of  a  specific  physical  and  social  environ- 
ment. Concrete  freedom  is  the  attainment  of  a  more  stable, 
organized  and  harmonious  individuality  through  the  exercise  of 
freedom  in  the  primary  sense  of  freedom  of  choice  or  self-deter- 
mination. To  be  free  in  the  latter  sense  is  to  be  a  unique  center 
of  spiritual  individuality.  To  become  free  in  the  full  sense  is 
to  achieve  the  organization  of  the  congenital  tendencies  or  im- 
pulses, instincts,  and  desires  by  the  spiritual  principle.  Full  free- 
dom is  complete  self-determination  through  the  service  of  the 
intrinsic  values  of  truth,  justice,  beauty,  and  love,  in  the  individ- 
ualized and  concrete  forms  in  which  these  values  alone  can  be 
actual  with  reference  to  the  unique  nature  and  specific  situation 
of  each  self. 

Self-determination  is  a  matter  of  degree.  It  is  proportionate 
to  the  harmonious  organization  of  the  self.  The  more  personality 
the  more  freedom.  The  self  which  is  most  capricious  and  uncer- 
tain in  its  choices  and  conations  is  most  unfree,  has  the  least  degree 
of  personality.  For  personality  is  the  harmonious  integration  of 
a  self's  impulsions  to  feel  and  to  think  and,  by  consequence,  to  act. 
Since  this  integration  rarely  attains  completeness,  there  are  many 
degrees  of  freedom.  The  capacity  for  further  integration  is  all 
the  freedom  from  the  chains  of  the  past  that  is  possible  or  desirable 
for  a  moral  agent. 

The  facts  of  moral  or  spiritual  new  birth  through  some  great 


MORAL  FREEDOM  455 

crisis,  as  well  as  of  moral  disintegration,  cannot  be  gainsaid.  In 
no  case  does  the  seeming  suddenness  of  the  critical  change  imply 
that  the  change  has  not  been  the  resultant  of  psychical  causes, 
slowly  incubating  in  the  self.  A  man  may  come  to  himself  sud- 
denly, and  think  it  was  a  miraculous  event,  an  act  of  divine  grace. 
I  do  not  question  his  right,  in  view  of  the  tremendous  significance 
of  the  change,  to  call  it  such.  But  changes  of  this  character  must 
always  be  the  results  of  the  gathering  into  one  focus,  and  the 
spiritual  synthesis,  of  forces  that  have  long  been  maturing.  The 
gates  of  the  future  are  not  locked  and  barred  eternally.  There 
are  new  creative  syntheses  in  the  volitional  life,  as  in  other  phases 
of  reality.  But  spiritual  regeneration,  as  well  as  degeneration, 
has  always  its  causal  conditions. 

The  wars  in  our  members,  the  inharmonious  partial  selves  that 
inhabit  our  bodies,  are  conflicting  phases  of  a  mind  or  soul  that  is 
not  at  unity  with  itself  and  therefore  not  at  unity  with  the  uni- 
verse. The  slave  of  habit  is  one  in  whom  have  been  formed 
habitual  dispositions  of  desiring  and  striving  that  are  in  conflict 
with  the  gleams  of  a  richer  and  more  harmonious  personality 
which  he  now  and  then  entertains.  One  may  be  even  a  slave  of 
good  habits,  by  becoming  a  creature  of  routine  and  convention,  to 
the  extent  that  he  loses  the  capacity  for  spiritual  growth.  True 
freedom  is  rational  self-realization  and  self-direction,  since  reason 
is  the  generalizing,  organizing,  evaluating,  end-determining  and 
means-finding  instrument,  by  which  the  native  impulsions  and 
desires  are  organized  into  the  master  sentiments,  which  are,  in 
their  indiscerptible  interpenetration,  tire  personality  as  a  feeling 
and  willing  being.  The  popular  notion  that  there  is  an  incom- 
patibility between  reason  and  sentiment,  as  guides  to  conduct,  is 
erroneous.  Pure  reason,  if  there  be  such  a  thing,  never  moved  or 
restrained  anybody.  Crude  instinct  and  emotion  unregulated 
never  developed  into  a  coherent  self.  It  is  through  the  refinement 
or  sublimation,  and  the  organization,  of  the  connate  feeling-life  in 
the  light  of  reflection  that  stability,  harmony  and  ordered  growth 
become  qualities  of  the  self;  and  thus  the  self  becomes  a  person. 

Kant  defined  free  action  as  action  done  wholly  in  obedience  to 
the  law  of  practical  reason,  out  of  reverence  for  the  moral  law. 
Kant  was  right  in  contending  that  free  action  is  rational  action 
which  takes  account  of  the  specific  impulses  and  situation  of  the 
self  in  the  light  of  a  moral  universe  or  system  of  persons   (his 


456  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

kingdom  of  ends).  He  was  wrong  in  failing  to  recognize  fully 
that  the  dynamic  materials  of  all  action,  and  as  well  the  specific 
sources  of  all  judgments  of  value,  are  the  connate  impulses  and 
interests  of  the  self,  as  these  are  modified  by  the  social  soil  and 
atmosphere.  The  moral  person  is  always  a  concrete  organization 
of  human  interests,  and  this  organization  is  always  effected  in  a 
social  medium. 

Bergson,  in  his  fascinating  book,  Time  and  Free  'Will,  argues, 
somewhat  as  I  have  argued,  that  personal  life  is  a  creative  process 
in  which  the  deeds  of  the  past  are  not,  in  the  present  moment,  the 
sole  condition  of  the  future.    Man,  says  Bergson,  lives  upon  shal- 
lower planes  of  routine  most  of  his  time ;  but,  occasionally,  and  in 
critical  moments,  his  deeper  self  wells  up  and  overflows  and  alters 
the  direction  of  the  routine  plane  of  life ;  then  is  man  most  free ; 
then  are  his  acts  least  predictable,  since  each  free  act  is  a  creative 
moment  in  the  history  of  a  personality.     Thus  the  living  moment 
of  willing,  in  which  the  self  puts  into  its  choice  the  greatest  full- 
ness of  its  psychical  being,  is  a  new  increment  in  the  growth  of 
personality.     I  grant  that  man  is  most  free  when  his  deeper  and 
more  enduring  sentiments  or  permanent  dispositions  to  feel  and 
think  are  most  fully  expressed,  and  that  in  such  moments  the  self 
ascends  to  new  heights  of  personality,  wins  to  higher  grades  of 
self-realization.     I  grant  too,  that  no  one,  perhaps  not  even  an 
omniscient  being,  could  fully  foresee  the  outcome  of  such  creative 
moments.     An  omniscient  being  must  know  all  there  is  to  know, 
but  he  cannot  know  as  fact  what  is  not  yet  fact.     If  the  develop- 
ment of  personality,  and  indeed  the  development  of  subpersonal 
life,  be  not  wholly  illusory,  then  we  live  in  a  growing  universe. 
But  I  do  not  think  that  pure  indeterminism  follows.     The  capaci- 
ties of  selfhood  that  are  being,  and  that  are  to  be,  realized  by  the 
freest  volitions  are,  nevertheless,  specific  dynamic  qualities;  not 
indeterminate  possibilities  but  determinate  possibilities  of  creative 
resultants.     The  freest  act  is  just  the  act  in  which  the  deepest 
nature,  or  dunamis,  of  selfhood  comes  to  fruition.     If  it  be,  in 
serving  one's  friends,  one's  country  or  one's  fellows,  in  devotion  to 
truth  and  justice,   in  the  discovery  or  creation  of  beauty  and 
knowledge,  in  the  life  of  love  and  loyalty,  that  man  is  most  free, 
as  I  believe,  it  is  just  because  in  such  attitudes  and  acts  man's 
deepest  and  most  abiding  nature  wins  expression.     There  is  no 
indeterminism,  no  unearned  conation;  but  there  are  various  planes 


MORAL  FREEDOM  457 

of  action,  superficial  and  deeper,  conventional  and  personal,  ani- 
mal and  spiritual.  Each  type  of  being  is  most  free  when  it  acts 
most  in  accordance  with  its  true  nature ;  man,  therefore,  when  he 
acts  most  in  accordance  with  his  nature  as  affectional,  social, 
rational  and  creatively  imaginative.  In  brief,  man  is  most  unfree 
when  he  is  content  to  live  by  bread  alone,  if  indeed  he  be  ever  thus 
content ;  most  free  when  he  lives  most  fully  as  a  spirit  or  person  in 
and  for  and  through  the  cosmos  of  persons. 

Every  act  of  genuine  freedom  means  a  novel  and  unique  event 
in  the  history  of  the  universe.  If  there  be  freedom,  then  ulti- 
mate reality  must  include  change.  In  the  exercise  and  achieve- 
ment of  freedom  man  affirms  the  absolute  or  ultimate  in  himself. 
He  transcends  the  world  of  passive  fact  and  becomes  a  creative 
center  of  spiritual  life.  In  so  far,  then,  as  man  is  free,  the 
supreme  spirit  or  ultimate  ground  of  reality  seems  to  be  limited 
or  finite.  But  this  limitation  need  not  constitute  an  external 
limitation  on  the  will  of  the  supreme  spirit.  The  true  end  of 
action  for  every  human  self  is  harmony  with  the  ultimate  society 
of  selves.  This  harmony  is  attained  only  through  devotion  to  those 
ideal  values  which  reflect,  and  are  rooted  in  the  nature  of,  the 
supreme  unity.  The  ultimate  spiritual  unity  must  thus  make 
possible  the  harmony  of  finite  selves;  hence  the  freedom  of  the 
latter  may  have  its  ground  in  an  apparent  self-limitation  of  the 
supreme  self,  which  is  really  the  self-expression  of  the  latter's  con- 
crete individualitv.  The  absoluteness  which  would  be  saved  to  a 
supreme  self  by  the  denial  of  human  self-initiative  would  be  the 
state  of  an  oriental  despot  without  character,  friends,  or  com- 
panions. One  could  not  define  such  a  being  as  spirit  at  all.  An 
ultimate  spirit  or  person  can  be  such  only  in  relation  to  a  com- 
munity or  society  of  selves,  in  whose  lives  and  destinies  and  deeds 
his  own  life  and  purpose  are  fulfilled. 


CHAPTER  XXXIV 


IMMOKTALITY 


The  possibility  of  the  continued  existence  of  the  self  after 
bodily  dissolution  clearly  depends  on  the  nonidentity  of  the  con- 
scious or  "spiritual"  individual  with  the  body.  Apart  from  the 
supposed  evidence  afforded  by  communications  from  departed 
spirits,  the  grounds  for  a  credible  hope  of  immortality  must  be,  in 
the  very  nature  of  the  case,  indirect.  It  is  a  question  of  empirical 
possibility,  reinforced  by  rational  probability. 

The  monistic  or  identity  theory,  which  regards  the  mental  and 
physical  series  as  the  two  parallel  manifestations  of  one  substance, 
whose  nature  is  not  known  to  us,  is  incompatible  with  personal 
immortality.  For,  whether  parallelism  be  taken  in  the  more 
restricted  sense  of  psychoneural,  or  the  more  general  sense  of  com- 
plete psychophysical,  parallelism;  in  either  case  it  follows  that, 
when  the  physiological  complex  which  we  call  the  human  body  is 
disintegrated  and  dissipated  into  its  chemical  constituents,  the 
psychical  self  must  likewise  suffer  disintegration  into  correspond- 
ing psychical  elements.  I  have  argued  that  the  parallelistic 
hypothesis,  with  its  consequent  doctrine  of  a  neutral  substance  as 
the  underlying  identity  of  mind  and  body,  is  not  the  final  truth 
in  this  matter.  The  self,  as  an  active  synthetizing  principle,  is 
an  immaterial,  rational,  or  spiritual  individual,  which  is  so  inti- 
mately associated  with  the  body  as  to  form  with  it  a  complex 
individual  whole.  The  mental  self  is  partially  dependent  on  the 
body  and  perhaps  partially  independent  of  it. 

From  this  standpoint  individual  immortality  is  possible.  Fur- 
thermore, the  whole  world  process  has  probably  been  making,  and 
is  now  making,  for  the  development  and  self -fulfillment  of  person- 
alities. The  ultimate  meaning,  so  far  as  we  human  beings  can 
determine,  of  the  drift  of  natural  and  historical  evolution  seems 
to  be  the  production  and  perfection  of  reflective  and  self-active 

458 


IMMORTALITY  459 

individuals.  Hence,  unless  the  process  of  reality,  taken  in  its 
totality,  to  be  a  discontinuous  and  incoherent  jumble,  an  incon- 
sistent and  self-contradictory  world,  the  most  rational  postulate 
in  regard  to  the  future  is  that  selves  may  persist  and  attain  to 
higher  levels  of  development  under  other  conditions  than  the  pres- 
ent affords.  All  the  meanings  and  intrinsic  values  of  experience, 
all .  the  truly  significant  interests  and  worthful  features  of  the 
world  process,  are  concentered  in  the  lives  of  selves.  We  cannot 
understand  what  truth  or  harmonious  experience,  what  self- 
coherent  reality,  what  justice  and  love,  what  beauty  and  perfection, 
could  be  or  mean  apart  from  the  deeds  and  lives  of  selves. 

If  there  be  continuity,  conservation,  and  enhancement  of  the 
intrinsic  values  of  actual  experience,  then  personalities  must  be,  in 
some  manner,  permanent  elements  of  reality.  If  the  values  of  con- 
scious existence,  from  the  most  exact  and  universal  truth  to  the 
most  concretely  individualized  love  or  interpersonal  harmony,  be 
mere  will-o'-the-wisps,  delusive  phantoms  mysteriously  and  epi- 
sodically engendered  by  the  ever  shifting  complications  of  the  brute 
insensate  elements  of  things,  there  is  no  ultimate  meaning  and  no 
reasonableness  in  the  cosmical  process.  The  philosopher  who  pro- 
poses this  alternative  to  the  conservation  of  values  would  be,  with 
his  theories,  the  momentary  and  meaningless  offshoot  of  an  in- 
sensate and  nonmoral  world. 

The  perduration  of  the  spiritual  principle  of  personality  is, 
then,  a  rational  postulate  for  the  interpretation  of  this  temporal 
and  developing  world.  But,  when  we  attempt  to  determine  more 
specifically  what  immortality  may  mean  we  encounter  grave,  and, 
perhaps,  insurmountable  difficulties.  The  ordinary  man's  belief 
in  personal  immortality  involves,  doubtless,  the  assumption  of  the 
continued  conscious  identity  of  the  concrete  selfhood  in  the  future 
with  that  selfhood  in  the  past ;  in  other  words,  the  persistent  func- 
tioning of  memories.  The  minimal  meaning  of  personal  immor- 
tality seems  to  be  the  continuance  and  further  development  of  the 
individual  life  through  the  conservation  and  increasing  fulfillment 
of  moral  and  intellectual  achievement  and  of  affectional  experi- 
ences of  love  and  beauty.  Unless  a  self  be,  in  the  future,  contin- 
uous in  its  power  to  feel  and  to  know,  to  serve  and  enjoy  truth, 
goodness,  beauty  and  love,  in  and  with  the  community  of  other  per- 
sonal spirits — continuous  in  the  exercise  of  the  powers  which  it 
has  used  and  enjoyed,  however  imperfectly,  in  its  present  existence 


460  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

that  self  will  have  ceased  to  be.    If  its  powers  have  been  warped 

and  thwarted  here,  continued  existence  would  imply  the  liberation 
in  the  future  of  the  imprisoned  powers. 

Now,  clearly,  our  memories  are  the  empirical  basis  of  our 
feelings  of  personal  continuity,  although  memory  in  turn,  as  I 
have  previously  shown,  depends  on  the  functioning  of  the  syn- 
thetic principle  of  selfhood.  And  memories  depend,  to  a  very 
great  extent  at  least,  on  sensory  experiences.  Even  our  memories 
of  the  most  intimate  and  sacred  feelings  of  love,  friendship, 
spiritual  achievement,  joy  and  peace,  depend  in  part  on  sensory 
experiences.  We  cannot  recall  the  persons  of  our  dearest  friends 
without  some  recourse  to  sensory  images.  Sensory  experiences  are 
all  somehow  registered  in  the  central  nervous  system  as  functional 
modifications.  When  the  body,  and  therewith  the  nervous  system, 
have  finally  disintegrated,  does  not  this  whole  function  of  memory, 
the  empirical  basis  of  personality,  disappear  ? 

Perhaps !  But,  on  the  other  hand,  there  is  no  proof  that  the 
distilled  essence  of  our  physiologically  conditioned  experiences  and 
deeds  here  and  now  may  not  be  taken  up  into,  and  form  perduring 
functional  constituents  in,  the  nonphysical  self.  No  sensory 
process,  through  whatever  bodily  organ  it  may  come,  is  a  con- 
stituent in  the  life  of  the  actual  personality,  until  it  has  been 
assimilated  by  synthetic  activity  into  the  organization  of  the  con- 
scious selfhood.  Our  perceptual  imagery,  dependent  on  eye,  ear, 
or  skin,  and  on  the  functioning  of  the  cortical  areas,  first  gets  its 
meanings  and  values  through  the  active  mental  processes  of  as- 
similation, selection,  and  interpretation.  The  precondition  of  all 
relevant  and  useful  remembering  is  the  original  apprehension  of 
meanings.  In  contrast  with  the  mere  routine  repetition  of  blind 
associative  memory,  based  on  mere  contiguity,  relevant  or  logical 
memory,  which  reproduces  past  experiences  that  have  significant 
relations  to  present  ideas,  emotions,  and  purposes,  is  based  on  the 
original  apprehension  of  significant  relationships  in  the  parts  of 
experience  to  one  another  and  to  the  self. 

Cases  of  sensory  aphasia,  for  example,  so-called  psychical 
blindness  and  deafness,  wherein  the  eye  and  ear  with  their  appro- 
priate nerves  are  intact  and  the  cortical  areas  of  vision  and  hearing 
probably  defective,  exist  without  loss  of  reason  or  of  the  sense  of 
personal  identity.  Such  cases  lend  support  to  the  hypothesis  that 
the  synthetic  meaning-finding  principle  in  the  self  is  independent 


IMMORTALITY  461 

at  least  of  the  functioning  of  some  cortical  areas.1  Such  patho- 
logical cases  do  not  establish  the  complete  independence  of  the 
brain  on  the  part  of  the  synthetic  principle.  They  do  support  the 
validity  of  the  distinction  between  the  principle  of  significant  per- 
sonal memory  and  self-identity,  and  the  neurally  conditioned  func- 
tions of  perceptual  imagery.  The  synthetic  principle  seems  able 
to  function  when  the  sense  organs  and  the  cortical  areas  connected 
with  them  are  impaired;  in  other  words  when  the  neural  connec- 
tions between  the  sense-organs  are  broken  or  deranged.  On  the 
other  hand,  the  sense  of  personal  identity  seems  to  surfer  aberra- 
tion through  neural  derangements.  It  may  be  that  these  abnor- 
malities of  multiple  personality  and  insanity  are  the  results  of 
derangements  in  the  coordinating  mechanisms  which  connect  the 
sensory  and  motor  arrangements  for  the  expression  of  personality. 
The  synthetic  principle  then  would  be  the  immaterial  link  or 
unifier  of  sensory  experiences  and  motor  activities.  One  of  its 
chief  functions  would  be  to  make  and  break  connections  by  a 
selective  emphasis  of  various  materials  of  sense  experience.  From 
this  standpoint  the  immaterial  self  is  both  furthered  and  hindered 
in  its  activities  by  the  bodily  mechanism ;  which  is  its  instrument 
of  expression  in  the  present  world ;  but  a  faulty  instrument  which, 
when  seriously  deranged,  impedes  or  altogether  prevents  the  ex- 
pression of  the  mental  self.  Xo  facts  in  the  physiological  and 
pathological  orders  negative  the  possibility  that  the  mental  self, 
which  is  able,  by  its  selective  synthetizing  power,  to  organize  and 
interpret  the  sensory  materials  of  experience,  may  also  be  able, 
independently  of  its  present  body,  to  conserve  the  quintessence  of 
meanings,  values,  and  powers,  which  it  has  distilled  from  its 
material  environment  in  the  alembic  of  its  own  unique  self -activity. 

The  possibility  of  personal  immortality  is  open  as  an  object  of 
rational  faith.  If  no  proffered  proof  therefor  is  adequate,  no 
positive  disproof  is  forthcoming. 

I  cannot  regard  the  so-called  communications  from  departed 
persons  to  the  living  as  having  convincing  value.  The  evidence  for 
these  things  seems  to  me  thus  far  insufficient.     If  sufficient,  it 


1  Compare  the  very  ingenious  use  made  by  Bergson  of  such  cases  in  his 
Matter  and  Memory,  Chap.  2.  Also  Henry  Head,  "Aphasia  and  Kindred  Dis- 
orders of  Speech,"  Brain,  Vol.  43,  pt.  2,  pp.  87-165.  Also  Dr.  Head  on 
"Disorders  of  Symbolic  Thinking  and  Expression,"  British  Journal  of 
Psychology,  General  Section,  Vol.  xi,  pt.  2  (1921),  pp.  179-193. 


462  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

would  not  prove  immortality  but  only  continued  existence,  con- 
cerning the  value  of  which  I  should  be,  in  view  of  the  character 
of  the  communications,  very  doubtful. 

On  the  other  hand,  I  cannot  share  the  attitude  of  those 
scientists  and  philosophers  who  would  ignore  or  pooh-pooh  the 
investigation  of  the  so-called  spiritistic  phenomena.  I  grant  that 
discouragingly  little  has  thus  far  been  established  by  such  investi- 
gations. I  grant  too,  that  the  messages  which  have  come  through 
from  discarnate  spirits,  if  indeed  any  veridical  tidings  have  come 
through,  are,  for  the  most  part,  of  so  trivial  and  commonplace  a 
character  as  to  shed  but  little,  and  that  little  not  a  very  cheerful, 
light  on  the  conditions  of  existence  of  discarnate  spirits.  Never- 
theless, if  only  a  few  cases  of  communications  were  established, 
for  which  no  other  reasonable  explanation  could  be  found  than 
that  they  came  from  discarnate  spirits,  the  hope  of  immortality 
would  thereby  have  received  a  support  more  powerful  than  all  the 
speculations  and  reasonings  of  philosophers.  For,  the  greatest 
obstacle  to  faith  in  personal  immortality  is  the  apparent  fact  that 
the  functioning  of  the  individual  mind  (and  we  must  not  forget 
that  every  real  mind  is  an  individual  mind),  is  dependent  on  the 
functioning  of  a  nervous  system.  Strong  evidence  that  a  mental 
self,  which  had  once  been  associated  with  a  nervous  system,  con- 
tinues to  exist  without  that  nervous  system  would  be  strong  pre- 
sumptive evidence  of  personal  immortality.  The  objection  that 
evidence  of  the  continued  existence  of  persons  whom  one  knew  in 
their  earthly  lifetimes  would  not  prove  the  eternal  existence  of  any 
self  seems  to  me  a  quibble.  For,  if  a  self  can  survive  the  disin- 
tegration of  an  earthly  nervous  system,  that  is  strong  presumptive 
grounds  for  concluding  that  that  self  will  endure  so  long  as  it  is 
worthy  to  endure.  And  who  will  undertake  to  say  what  constitutes 
worthiness  to  endure  ?  While,  then,  I  am  not  yet  convinced  that 
the  continued  existence  of  discarnate  persons  has  been  established 
by  psychical  research,  I  regard  this  field  as  an  important  area  of 
investigation.  I  have  not  personally  engaged  upon  it,  because 
my  occupation  and,  in  part,  my  tastes,  have  not  led  me  to  do  so. 
But  it  seems  to  me  that  scientists  and  philosophers  who  neither 
engage  in  it  themselves  nor  admit  that  it  is  a  legitimate  field  for 
investigation  are  guilty  of  an  unwarrantable  dogmatism  and  are 
the  creatures  of  intellectual  prejudices.  On  the  other  hand  the 
pursuit  of  such  inquiries  requires  such  a  very  unusual  combination 


IMMORTALITY  463 

of  critical  dispassionateness,  mental  alertness,  power  of  weighing 
evidence,  expert  knowledge  of  physics,  physiology  and  psychology, 
that  I  think  it  is  a  field  into  which  but  few  should  venture. 

I  return  to  general  philosophical  considerations.  The  creative 
synthetic  principle  of  selfhood  must  persist.  The  concrete  per- 
sonality, that  is  organized  around  and  by  this  principle,  may  per- 
sist. But  how  ?  When  the  avenues  of  sense  and  motor  expression 
are  forever  closed  and  the  brain  has  ceased  to  function,  how  and 
with  what  heritage  from  its  physiologically  conditioned  life  on 
earth  does  the  spiritual  individual  take  its  flight  ?  No  one  who 
has  gazed  on  the  dead  body  of  a  loved  one  can  doubt  that  the 
mysterious  principle  which  conferred  meaning,  worth,  and  beauty 
on  that  tenement  of  clay  has  vanished.  It  is  unreasonable  that  it 
shall  have  vanished  into  utter  nothingness.  What  then  has  it  taken 
with  it,  from  the  epoch  of  its  career  which  is  now  closed  ?  Clear 
traces  of  its  earthly  experiences  and  deeds,  absorbed  into  or  fused 
with  the  conscious  unity  of  the  self  so  as  to  preserve  the  sense  of 
moral  and  spiritual  continuity  with  that  past  life  ?  Or  a  more 
highly  integrated  and  more  harmoniously  organized  individuality 
bearing,  without  continuity  of  personal  memory,  the  fruitage  of 
its  earthly  activities  ?  I  have  no  new  light  to  shed  on  this  momen- 
tous question.  I  hold,  however,  that  one  is  justified  in  believing  in 
the  continuity  of  personal  spirit,  as  a  real  possibility. 

A  self  may  inhabit,  after  death,  a  finer,  more  ethereal  body. 
I  may  add,  merely  as  a  personal  statement,  that  I  am  unable  to 
form  any  image  or  clear  concept  of  the  nature  and  conditions  of 
existence  of  a  purely  disembodied  spirit. 

The  persistence  and  continued  functioning  of  the  spiritual  core 
of  selfhood  is  a  matter  of  rationally  justifiable  faith.  The  degree 
and  character  of  continued  personal  identity  must  remain,  from 
the  standpoint  of  philosophy,  a  matter  of  conjecture. 

Faith  in  the  conservation  and  enhancement  of  spiritual  values 
is  a  rational  faith.  Indeed,  it  is  the  basis  of  faith  in  the  reason- 
ableness and  goodness  of  the  cosmical  order  itself.  If  the  spiritual 
values  of  human  existence  at  its  highest  term  of  development  and 
achievement  do  not  endure,  amidst  all  the  changes  and  chances  of 
this  mortal  universe,  there  seems  to  be  no  stable  or  coherent  mean- 
ing in  existence.  Then  the  universe  is  irrational — indeed  it  is  no 
universe  at  all. 

Faith  in  the  continuance  and  enhancement  of  the  intrinsic 


464  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS] 

values — faith  in  truth,  in  beauty,  in  friendship,  in  love  and  har- 
mony of  life — in  short,  faith  in  reason  and  the  worth  of  spiritual 
life — such  faith  is  only  another  name  for  faith  in  the  persistence 
of  spiritual  individuality.  For,  I  repeat,  these  values  are  real  only 
as  functions  of  personal  experience  and  deed.  To  have  faith  in  the 
permanence  of  intrinsic  values  is  to  assume  the  enduring  reality  of 
selves  who  know  truth,  feel  beauty,  who  love  and  win  spiritual 
harmony. 

On  the  other  hand,  this  is  eternal  life  here  and  now — to  know 
and  to  live  for  and  in  the  higher  values  of  the  spirit.  It  is  to 
empty  life  of  all  meaning  to  suppose  that  the  only  value  which  the 
present  existence  can  have  is  that  of  a  mere  preparation  for  some 
future  and  different  state  of  existence.  True  immortality  does 
not  consist  in  a  mere  continued  existence  in  time,  in  which  the 
attainment  of  genuinely  satisfying  and  lasting  values  is  postponed 
to  some  other  and  future  stage  of  life.  If  we  take  the  terms  "God" 
and  "Christ"  in  a  sufficiently  inclusive  humanistic  sense  to  embrace 
the  supremacy  of  all  spiritual  (that  is,  of  intellectual,  aesthetic, 
moral  and  other  interpersonal)  values,  we  may  say — "This  is 
eternal  life,  to  know  God  and  Jesus  Christ  whom  he  hath  sent." 
If  this  seem  to  any  reader  to  be  unduly  stretching  the  meaning  of 
historic  terms,  he  can  substitute  other  terms  more  to  his  liking.  I 
think  my  meaning  is  plain. 


BOOK  V 
THE  ORDER  OF  THE  UNIVERSE— COSMOLOGY 


CHAPTER  XXXV 


UNIVERSAL  ORDER 


We  have  now  considered  the  nature  and  implications  of  knowl- 
edge in  general,  the  general  structure  of  the  universe,  and  the 
nature  and  implications  of  personality  and  values.  It  remains  to 
gather  up  our  conclusions  into  a  comprehensive  conception  of  the 
structure  and  implications  of  our  world  of  experience  taken  as  a 
whole. 

We  have  seen  that  the  order  of  the  universe  must  include  a 
succession  of  levels  of  subordinate  orders.  Reality  exhibits  a 
hierarchy  of  grades  of  organization  or  integration.  I  shall  now 
briefly  resume  the  principal  steps  in  the  universal  order.  These 
are — (I)  the  spatial  and  temporal  order;  (II)  the  noetic  order; 
and  (III)  the  axiological  order  or  order  of  values. 

I.    The  Spatial  and  Temporal  Order 

Thought  of  crosswise  as  existing  in  a  temporal  instant  nature 
is  conceived  as  one  continuous  whole.  (Bear  in  mind  that  timeless 
instants  do  not  exist ;  the  notion  is  a  limiting  conception  or  abstrac- 
tion.) Nature  consists  of  macroscopic  spatial  configurations. 
But,  whether  we  look  at  nature  macroscopically  or  microscopically, 
its  configurations  are  relative  to  one  another.  To  use  Hegelian 
language:  "Each  one  is  an  other  of  others."  However  one  may 
elect  to  think  of  the  ultimate  elements  of  nature,  whether  as  atoms, 
electrons  or  other  punctiform  centers  of  energy,  any  single  element 
must  be  conceived  of  as  the  center  of  an  indefinitely  vast  network 
of  relationships.  The  character  of  a  spatial  element  is  defined  by 
its  position  and  its  position  determines  and  is  determined  by  its 
relations.  It  is  the  ultimate  aim  of  physical  science  to  describe  the 
qualitied  events,  which  are  any  empirical  chunk  of  nature,  in  terms 
of  the  positional  alterations  of  elements.  Physical  science  pre- 
supposes that  at  any  instant  nature  is  a  continuous  spatial  whole 

467 


468  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

/of  simultaneous  events.  Simultaneous  microscopic  events  are  just 
momentary  positions  in  space.  The  electrons  which  make  up  an 
atom  of  hydrogen  or  helium  are  a  system  of  momental  positions. 
Space  means  essentially  the  order  of  relationships  between  simul- 
taneously existing  positions.  A  spatial  system,  macroscopic  or 
microscopic,  is  an  order  of  elements  existing  simultaneously.  But 
there  are  no  timeless  instants.  It  is  just  as  true  of  an  atom  or 
electron  as  it  is  of  a  human  being  that  it  continueth  not  in  one 
stay.  A  spatial  configuration  is  a  moving  configuration,  and  since 
the  natures  of  its  elemental  particles  depend  on  their  positions  and 
these  are  changing,  geometrical  descriptions  of  nature  in  terms  of 
pure  spatial  relations  are  fictitious  accounts  of  fictitious  char- 
acters. An  atom  or  electron  is  like  Zeno's  arrow  in  that  it' 
is  always  moving  in  the  place  where  it  is  not.  Nature  is  ex- 
tended. It  has  spatial  quality  but  does  not  occupy  space,  for 
space  exists  only  in  the  form  of  abstraction  from  the  dynamic 
content  of  reality.  Bergson  is  right  in  holding  that  reality  is 
duration  and  that  to  conceive  it  as  a  purely  spatial  mechanism  is 
to  arrest  its  actual  flow  and  distort  the  moving,  changing,  grow- 
ing life  of  nature  into  unreal  abstractions.  As  Doctor  Whitehead 
finely  says — "The  passage  of  nature,  which  is  only  another 
name  for  the  creative  force  of  existence,  has  no  narrow  ledge  of 
definite  instantaneous  present  within  which  to  operate.  Its 
operative  presence,  which  is  now  urging  nature  forward  must  be 
sought  for  through  the  whole,  in  the  remotest  past  as  well  as  in 
the  narrowest  breadth  of  any  present  duration.  Perhaps  also  in 
the  unrealized  future.  Perhaps  also  in  the  future  which  might  be 
as  well  as  in  the  actual  future  which  will  be.  It  is  impossible  to 
meditate  on  time  and  the  mystery  of  the  creative  passage  of  nature 
without  an  overwhelming  emotion  at  the  limitations  of  human 
intelligence."  * 

Indeed  the  notion  of  a  point  or  position  in  space  implies  a 
relation  between  this  point  and  at  least  one  other  point,  and 
spatial  sense  or  direction  whi^h  implies  time.  And  all  attempts 
to  conceive  a  totality  of  space  involve  time,  since  the  synthesis  by 
which  one  thinks  together  finite  spaces,  say  the  interstellar  spaces, 
as  parts  of  one  whole,  implies  time.  A  space  world  is  a  continu- 
ous whole  and  the  notion  of  continuity  involves  time.     The  notion 


1  The  Concept  of  Nature,  p.  73. 


UNIVERSAL  ORDER  469 

of  boundless  space  implies  that  of  endless  time.  Thus  the  notion 
of  a  boundless  space  is  a  pictorial  symbol  for  the  mind's  conscious- 
ness of  its  own  capacity  to  repeat  indefinitely  a  well-defined  act 
of  thought.  A  boundless  space  means  that  one  can  think  on  indef- 
initely imagining  one  space  configuration  to  be  contained  in  a 
larger  configuration.  A  space-whole  actually  infinite  could  be  con- 
ceived to  exist  only  in  an  endless  duration;  therefore  an  actually 
infini/te  space  could  never  exist  at  any  moment  of  time.  The 
ordinary  notion  of  infinite  space  is  that  of  a  vague  penumbra  which 
is  thought  of  as  the  fringe  of  our  definite  perceptions  and  concep- 
tions of  spatial  order. 

Duration  or  time,  the  dynamic  aspect  of  nature,  is  thus  more 
fundamental  to  the  structure  of  reality  than  space,  the  static' 
aspect.  As  S.  Alexander  puts  it,  time  is  the  soul  of  space  and  space 
is  the  body  of  time.  Since  our  conception  of  reality  is  dynamical, 
for  us  the  soul  of  anything  is  its  reality  of  which  its  body  is  the 
expression.  Any  bit  of  space  is  the  trail  of  action  and  suffering 
on  the  part  of  dynamic  monads.  Space  persists  because  centers  of 
action  and  suffering  persist,  and  therefore  the  relations  between 
them  continue  or  are  repeated.  A  permanent  spatial  configuration 
is  consentaneous  with  the  persistence  of  a  set  of  dynamical  rela- 
tions. An  actual  space,  perceived  or  imagined,  is  a  perspective 
or  point  of  view,  taken  by  a  percipient,  of  actual  and  possible 
dynamical  transactions  between  itself  and  other  contemporane- 
ously existing  reals.  Positions  or  situations  involve  temporal 
simultaneity.  A  distinction  between  two  positions  implies  the 
duration  of  the  movement  of  a  point  from  one  position  to  the 
other.  We  become  habituated  to  thinking  of  the  actual  or  imagined 
space  complex  which  we  can  envisage  as  not  involving  time.  I 
do  not,  for  instance,  think  of  time  as  being  involved  in  the  space- 
whole  that  I  take  in  as  I  look  out  of  my  study  window.  But,  if  I 
am  asked  how  far  it  is  to  yonder  tree,  I  can  answer  the  question 
only  by  estimating  the  number  of  successive  movements  of  a  yard- 
stick or  of  pacing  out  the  distance.  Moreover,  the  very  notion  of 
distance  and  of  direction  in  space  implies  the  duration  of  the 
objects,  thus  spatially  related,  through  finite  times.  In  short,  any 
set  of  entities  spatially  related  is  a  set  of  entities  persisting,  that 
is,  having  a  duration  in  time. 

It  is  misleading  to  speak  of  time  as  a  fourth  dimension  of 
space.    Time  is  not  a  dimension.    It  is  becoming.    It  is  change,  the 


470  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

passage  of  events.  As  Doctor  Whitehead  puts  it:  "There  can  be 
no  time  apart  from  space ;  and  no  space  apart  from  time ;  and  no 
space  and  time  apart  from  the  passage  of  the  events  of  nature. 
The  isolation  of  an  entity  in  thought,  when  we  think  of  it  as  a  bare 
'it,'  has  no  counterpart  in  any  corresponding  isolation  in  nature. 
Such  isolation  is  merely  part  of  the  procedure  of  intellectual 
knowledge."  2  Thus  the  idea  that  nature  is  merely  an  aggregate 
of  independent  entities  each  capable  of  isolation  is  false.3  A  time- 
less space  is  an  intellectual  abstraction  just  as  a  "point"  or  "in- 
stant" is.  Space  and  time  spring  from  a  common  root.  The 
ultimate  fact  of  experience  is  a  space-time  fact.4  We  are  aware  of 
V  nature  enduring  .  .  .  Thus  awareness  of  nature  begins  in  aware- 
ness of  a  whole  which  is  present  because  this  present  whole  of  nature 
is  "duration."  A  duration  is  a  "temporal  slab  of  nature." 
Nature  at  a  moment  exhibits,  among  other  things,  the  relation  of 
a  three-dimensional  space ;  this  is  instantaneous  space.  The  instan- 
taneous points  of  such  a  space  are  routes  of  approximation  con- 
structed on  the  same  general  principle  as  moments;  namely,  a 
point  series  is  an  infinite  series  of  events,  every  event  extended 
over  all  the  events  subsequent  to  it  in  the  series ;  the  whole  series 
converges  towards  an  ideal  of  an  event  of  nonextension.  An 
instantaneous  point  is  better  named  an  "event  particle."  Event 
particles  form  a  four-dimensional  manifold  which  is  divided  into 
.three-dimensional  instantaneous  spaces  which  lie  within  the  several 
moments.  We  should  speak  more  accurately  in  the  plural,  namely 
of  "times  and  spaces"  and  not  of  time  and  space.5  Durations,  or 
events,  which  constitute  the  passage  of  nature,  says  Doctor  White- 
head, extend  over  one  another.  For  example — "a  volume  may 
be  defined  as  the  locus  of  the  event  particles  in  which  a  moment 
intersects  an  event,  provided  that  the  two  do  intersect."  8  "An 
event  will  be  said  to  occupy  the  aggregate  of  event  particles  which 
lie  within  it."  7    "But  there  are  alternative  time  systems,  and  each 


•  Op.  eit.,  p.  142. 

*  Op.  dt.,  p.  141. 

*  Op.  cit.,  p.  132. 

6  See  A.  N.  Whitehead  in  Symposium,  "Time,  Space,  and  Material," 
Problems  of  Science  and  Philosophy,  Publications  of  Aristotelean  Society,  1919, 
pp.  44-57;  and  Mr.  Whitehead's  An  Inquiry  into  the  Principles  of  Natural 
Knowledge,  and  The  Concept  of  Nature,  passim. 

•  The  Concept  of  Nature,  p.  101. 

7  Ibid.,  p.  101. 


UNIVERSAL  ORDER  471 

time  system  has  its  own  peculiar  system  of  grouped  points."  8  A 
point  is  an  absolute  position  in  the  timeless  space  of  a  given  time 
system.  An  object,  as  Doctor  Whitehead  conceives  it,  is  a  factor 
in  nature  which  is  without  passage.  We  are  not  directly  aware  of 
objects  but  we  are  aware  of  sameness  or  repetition  of  quality  in 
events.  No  two  events  are  exactly  alike  but  they  may  have  simi- 
larities. "An  object  is  an  ingredient  in  the  character  of  some 
event.  In  fact  the  character  of  an  event  is  nothing  but  the  objects 
which  are  ingredient  in  it  and  the  ways  in  which  those  objects 
make  their  ingression  into  the  event.  Thus  the  theory  of  objects  is 
the  theory  of  the  comparison  of  events.  Events  are  only  com- 
parable because  they  body  forth  only  permanences  .  .  .  Objects 
are  the  elements  in  nature  which  can  be  again."  9  But  since  events 
are  percipient  events  or  moments  of  awareness,  as  Doctor  White- 
head calls  them,  and  since  no  two  of  these  can  be  alike  and  they  are 
all  transitory  durations  in  nature  as  the  object  of  sense  awareness, 
there  can  be  no  permanence.  Objects  or  permanences  are  con- 
structed through  the  recognition  of  sameness  or  repetition  in  the 
quality  of  events.  In  the  case  of  perceptual  objects,  such  as  a 
coat  with  shape,  texture  and  color,  Doctor  Whitehead  says  that  the 
percipient  event  is  the  situation  of  a  variety  of  sense  objects  due 
in  this  case  to  the  interplay  of  sense  objects  of  touch  and  sense 
objects  of  sight.  But  a  sense  object  brown  or  woolly  is  nothing  by 
itself.  It  is  an  abstraction  from  the  perceptual  object  and  the  rela- 
tive permanences  and  interdependences,  the  orderly  persistences, 
comings  and  goings  of  perceptual  objects  imply  that  nature  is  some- 
thing more  than  passage.  It  is  orderly  passage.  Thus  percipient 
events,  as  awareness,  and  their  objects  involve  a  permanent  or  sub- 
stantial order,  an  ultimate  space-time  order  of  which  our  awareness 
of  passing  events  and  of  the  particular  objects  through  the  passage 
of  events  are  finite  perspectives. 

Doctor  Whitehead  states  that  the  continuity  of  nature  in  its 
passage  is  due  to  the  fact  that  durations  overlap  or  extend  over  one 
another  and  that  there  are  no  timeless  instants.  It  follows  that 
there  are  in  reality  no  absolute  maximal  or  minimal  durations. 
The  overlapping  of  finite  durations,  which  is  the  empirical  basis 
for  the  belief  in  the  continuity  of  nature,  implies  the  permanence 


9 


Ibid.,  p.   106. 
Ibid.,  pp.  143,  144. 


472  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

of  an  order  to  which  all  finite  durations  are  subject.  And  since 
this  order  is  the  order  of  all  durations  it  must  be  the  timeless  order 
of  temporal  events.  In  brief,  unless  nature,  in  the  sense  of  the 
space-time  world,  be  a  mere  collective  name  for  an  absolutely  dis- 
crete and  chaotic  succession  of  finite  events  or  durations,  it  is  the 
manifestation  of  a  permanent  or  supertemporal  order,  an  invariant 
principle. 

Indeed  an  invariant  principle  or  supertemporal  order  is  im- 
plied in  all  our  human  standards  of  time  measurement.  If  we 
recognize,  as  we  do,  the  relativity  of  our  actual  standards  to  some 
more  nearly  invariant  standard,  this  very  recognition  is  a  route  of 
approximation  to  an  implied  absolute  invariant.  We  correct  our 
sensuous  estimates  of  time  by  the  watch,  the  watch  by  the  astro- 
nomical clock,  the  astronomical  clock  by  large  scale  sidereal  move- 
ments which  are  the  closest  approximation  we  can  make  to  an  invari- 
ant rhythm.  And  when  the  astronomer,  for  example,  makes  allow- 
ance for  the  slowing  up  of  the  velocity  of  the  earth's  rotation  he  is 
seeking  the  closest  possible  approximation  to  an  invariant  order — 
to  a  perfect  cosmical  rhythm. 

Nature  is  the  all-inclusive  space-time  world.  There  is  no  non- 
temporal  space  world  or  nonspatial  temporal  world.  Space  is  the 
order  of  interaction  among  contemporaneously  enduring  monads. 
Space  means  the  permanence  or  perduration  of  interacting  centers. 
Space  means  that  the  perduring  centers  of  relationship  are  a  sys- 
tem. It  implies  the  unity  and  continuity  of  a  supertemporal 
ground  of  interaction — a  world  ground.  There  can  be  no  inter- 
actions without  a  ground  and  there  can  be  no  permanence  or  order 
unless  the  ground  of  interaction  be  supertemporal.  As  Lotze 
argued :  If  two  elements,  A  and  B,  are  related  in  any  way,  then 
either  the  relation  is  both  relevant  to  A  and  B  and  they  are  ele- 
ments in  one  system  or  the  relation  R  is  wholly  irrelevant  to  the 
being  of  both  A  and  B  and  their  mutual  influence ;  then  we  have 
A,  B,  and  B,  as  atomic  entities,  but  no  real  A-B-B.  The  relation 
does  not  really  relate.  Either  the  terms,  supposed  to  be  related, 
fall  wholly  apart,  or  we  must  seek  other  relations  Rx  and  B2  to 
relate  R  to  A  and  B,  respectively,  and  still  further  relations  to  con- 
nect A-Ri-R  and  R-R2-B  and  so  on,  indefinitely;  or  we  must 
assume  a  common  ground  or  medium  of  the  interaction  of  the 
simplest  elements  in  the  system  of  reality.  We  can  never  get  A 
and  B  related  in  any  fashion  unless  we  presuppose  the  one  ground 


UNIVERSAL  ORDER  473 

or  medium.  Thus,  all  the  relations  and  entities  related  can  so 
exist  as  parts  of  the  one  real  being.  This  argument  of  Lotze's,  the 
principle  of  which  is  involved  in  all  singularisms  from  Parmenides 
to  Spinoza  and  Bradley,  if  taken  in  this  form,  involves  pantheism. 
Everything  finite  is  a  part  of  the  one. 

But  may  not,  as  James  Ward  puts  it,  the  interaction  between 
finite  entities  be  in  the  nature  of  immediate  rapport?  May  not 
reality  be  a  pluralistically  conceived  collection  of  interactive  and 
interpatient  beings,  each  one  acting  directly  on  others  ?  It  may 
possibly,  but  in  this  case  there  would  be  no  intelligible  basis  for 
the  orderly  or  determinate  modes  of  continuous  interaction  between 
the  plural  reals.  Leibniz'  monads  act  in  harmony,  because  there 
is  a  principle  or  ground  of  order  which  so  determines  them  to  act. 
Whatever  be  the  degree  of  order  or  systematic  continuity  in  the 
transactions  of  finite  entities,  to  that  same  degree  there  must  be  a 
cosmic  principle  of  order.  In  so  far  as  there  may  be  contingency 
or  chance  in  the  course  of  things,  to  that  same  degree  there  is,  of 
course,  a  limit  to  the  principle  of  order. 

Instead  of  saying  that  there  must  be  one  medium  of  interaction 
between  the  plural  reals,  which  seems  to  me  a  misleading  spatial 
metaphor  that  logically  involves  one  in  a  geometrical  and  fatalistic 
pantheism,  a  "block  universe"  type  of  doctrine,  I  would  hold  that 
the  interrelation  of  the  monads  or  individua  (the  finite  entities) 
has  its  final  ground  in  a  cosmic  principle  of  order,  which,  in  its 
own  being,  transcends  these  transactions  between  finite  reals.  The 
cosmic  ground  of  order  is  thus,  not  the  medium  of  interaction,  but 
the  source  of  the  properties  or  laivs  of  behavior  by  virtue  of  which 
finite  individua  interact.  It  is,  I  shall  try  to  show  more  fully  in 
the  sequel,  an  over-self,  a  transcendent  spiritual  unity,  or  super- 
personal  community  (the  latter  is  my  understanding  of  the  doc- 
trine of  the  Trinity).  The  notion  of  an  over-self  or  superpersonal 
community  of  life  is  more  than  simply  the  most  adequate  ground 
for  the  personal  and  spiritual  life  of  man.  It  is,  logically  and 
psychologically,  the  most  adequate  conceptual  basis  to  account  for 
the  unity  and  continuity  of  the  universe  in  its  physical  and  vital 
aspects. 

Not  an  all-inclusive  or  all-containing  being,  but  one  perduring 
originating  and  sustaining  ground  of  order,  is  for  me,  the  ultimate 
reality.  In  the  remainder  of  this  chapter  I  shall  try  to  develop 
and  illustrate  this  conception. 


474  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

The  conception  of  the  ether  of  space  among  physicists  illus- 
trates the  inescapable  necessity  of  thought  to  conceive  a  ground 
of  interaction.  However  the  electrons  may  be  conceived,  the  im- 
possibility of  thinking  that  forces  act  across  absolutely  empty 
space,  which  is  nonbeing,  or  that  the  ultimate  ground  of  our 
physical  world  can  be  an  indefinite  multitude  of  absolutely  discrete 
centers  of  force,ileads  inevitably  to  the  hypothesis  that  macroscopic 
matter  has  its  common  ground  in  the  relations  of  microscopic 
specks  or  centers  of  activity  or  inertia  which  are  in  motion  in  the 
ether.  The  ether  is  a  perfect  fluid  through  which  these  microscopic 
specks  stream  without  meeting  any  perceptible  resistance.  To  say 
that  ether  is  a  perfect  fluid  is  only  another  way  of  saying  that  there 
must  be  a  continuous  medium  or  ground  of  interaction  among  the 
discrete  force  centers.  The  extreme  tenuity  and  elasticity  of  the 
ether  are  the  physicist's  way  of  expressing  the  need  for  a  unitary 
conserving  principle  as  the  ground  of  the  order  of  interaction  among 
atoms  and  electrons.  Thus,  the  ether  is  a  symbolic  concept,  which 
means  that  the  ultimate  ground  of  all  physical  activities  must  be 
the  conserving  self-activity  of  the  supreme  cosmical  force.  As  I 
understand  it,  in  the  Einstein  theory  of  relativity  the  ether  is  dis- 
pensed with.  But  if  the  electron  theory  or  any  other  theory  of 
the  granular  structure  of  the  physical  world  wins  out,  it  will  be 
necessary  to  postulate  in  some  other  form  an  ultimate  ground  of 
order  and  continuity. 

Nature  is  a  system  of  interactive  and  interpatient  elements. 
Each  of  these  elements  is  a  space-time  reality;  it  is  spatial  as 
being  a  member  of  the  contemporaneous  system  of  nature,  and  it  is 
temporal  as  enduring;  it  is  dynamical  inasmuch  as  it  acts  and 
suffers.  The  whole  continuous  system  implies  a  self-conserving 
active  ground  of  order.  The  universe  of  nature  has  the  crosswise 
or  simultaneous  order  of  a  system  of  contemporaneously  related 
elements  and  the  lengthwise  order  of  a  continuous  or  enduring 
process.  The  lengthwise  aspect  of  order  is  not,  as  we  have  seen  in 
a  previous  chapter,  that  of  complete  qualitative  identity  in  the 
successive  events  which  constitute  the  history  of  nature.  The  order 
of  nature  is  a  creative  advance.  Nevertheless  it  is  an  order  and 
therefore  there  must  be  a  supertemporal  ground  of  the  history  of 
nature.  This  ground  must  be  an  everenduring  principle  of 
creative  self-activity. 

Since  all  our  notions  of  continuous  self-activity  are  derived 


UNIVERSAL  ORDER  475 

from  our  immediate  experiences  thereof  in  our  own  impulsive  and 
purposive  efforts,  and  since  the  more  organized  continuity  there 
is  in  a  center  of  activity,  the  more  does  that  center  approach  to 
the  type  of  a  personal  self,  are  we  not  warranted  in  saying  that  the 
ultimate  sustaining  active  ground  of  order,  of  organization  and 
continuity,  for  the  universe  is  best  conceived  after  the  analogy  of 
a  self? 

II.    The  Ultimate  Noetic  Oedee 

We  have  already  argued  at  length,  in  chapters  III  to  VIII,  that 
all  striving  towards  fuDer  truth  is  guided  by  the  ideal  of  systematic 
wholeness,  self-coherence,  or  organization.  We  do  not  possess  a 
completely  harmonious  system  of  truth,  and  perhaps  we  never 
shall.  Our  human  truths  are  not  falsified  by  their  partial  or 
fragmentary  character,  by  the  fact  that  we  do  not  know  the  whole 
truth  in  its  harmonious  completeness.  That,  in  a  general  sense,  we 
can  know  the  whole  in  outline  follows  from  the  fact  that  there  is 
an  ideal  or  standard  of  self-coherence  or  harmony  in  a  system,  by 
which  we  measure  our  partial  truths  in  their  reference  to  one 
another.  Thus  we  fill  in  progressively  the  details  of  that  hor- 
monious  organization  of  insight  which,  as  ideal  and  standard,  is 
ever  before  us.  On  the  other  hand,  the  true  principles  of  logic, 
mathematics,  and  all  other  fields,  are  not  made  true  by  the  indi- 
vidual's thinking  nor  falsified  by  the  individual's  failure  to  think 
them.  Truth,  for  us,  is  the  growing  interpretation,  and  expression 
in  symbols,  of  the  meanings  of  reality — of  its  structure  and  order. 
Our  partial  grasp  of  the  order  of  reality  must  be  an  approximation, 
however  imperfect,  to  the  reality  itself.  Our  interpretations  of 
that  order  may  need,  from  time  to  time,  radical  revision.  We 
cannot  foresee  the  changes  that  are  yet  to  come  in  the  creative  but 
orderly  process  of  the  whole  but  these  changes  must  themselves  be 
the  expression  of  the  fundamental  order.  Only  thus  can  we  think 
of  universe,  totality,  cosmic  process.  There  must  then  be  one 
objective  and  intelligible  order  which  corresponds  (though  we  may 
not,  now  or  ever,  fully  know  just  how  in  detail  this  correspondence 
works  out)  to  the  standard  of  a  self-coherent  or  harmonious  totality. 
The  organizing  and  conserving  order  of  the  universe  throughout 
its  history  must  be  an  active  reason  or  intelligence.  In  tracing  out 
the  lineaments  of  the  cosmical  order  on  the  fields  of  nature  and 
human  history  we  are  learning,  step  by  step,  the  character  of  the 


476  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

supreme  order,  and  we  are  realizing  our  rational  individuality  by 
coming  into  conscious  harmony  with  that  order. 

Thus  we  are  led,  from  a  consideration  of  the  spatial  and  tem- 
poral continuity  of  the  world  and  from  a  consideration  of  the 
nature  of  truth,  to  the  notion  of  a  cosmic  will  or  dynamic  intelli- 
gence as  the  ground  of  the  world  order.  Whether  this  order-power 
works  in  the  face  of  external  obstructions  is  a  question  we  shall 
consider  later.  Before  we  do  so,  we  shall  consider  the  place  of 
values  and  of  selves  in  relation  to  the  supreme  order. 

III.    The  Cosmic  Ground  of  Values 

Truth  is  one  form  of  value.  But  it  is  basic  to  all  other  forms 
of  value.  The  validity  of  all  values,  which  means,  in  the  final 
analysis,  their  cosmic  standing,  depends  on  the  validity  of  the 
truth-value.  Pragmatic  and  instrumentalist  conceptions  of  truth, 
which  would  reduce  it  to  the  position  of  a  tool  or  instrument  to 
further  values  extrinsic  to  itself — such  as  emotional  satisfactions, 
so-called  practical  ends,  and  "social  welfare" — reduce  all  values 
to  mere  ephemeral  tracings  on  the  shifting  sands  of  the  purely 
human.  Subjectivism  is  not  escaped  by  appeal  to  the  social,  or 
even  universally  human,  character  of  desire  and  need.  Unless 
truth  have  an  objective  and  cosmic  reference,  humanity  is  hope- 
lessly and  forever  shut  up  within  its  own  skin;  its  deepest  and 
noblest  sentiments  are  naught  but  human  illusions,  vain  imagin- 
ings, unless  the  human  intellect  can  somehow  lay  hold,  however 
feebly  and  gropingly,  on  the  nature  of  things.  Whatsoever  cosmic 
status  other  values  may  have,  they  can  have  it  only  as  being  in 
harmony  with  the  real  objective  order  as  apprehended  by  reason. 

Goodness  is  the  quality  of  sentiments  (organized  dispositions 
to  feel  and  act)  and  of  volitions  (sentiments  in  action).  Good- 
ness appertains  only  to  conscious  and  intelligent  life.  Beauty, 
whether  of  nature,  art,  or  personal  character,  has  no  meaning  and 
no  existence  apart  from  conscious  and  intelligent  life.  The  cosmic 
status  of  goodness  and  beauty  depends  on  the  perduration,  in  the 
cosmic  order,  of  conscious  and  rational  life.  Truth  is  the  most 
comprehensive  and  fundamental  and  enduring  harmony  between 
conscious  life,  as  capable  of  reflection  upon  the  objective  condi- 
tions of  its  own  being,  and  the  cosmic  order.  Therefore  the 
objective  and  cosmic  standing  of  all  values  depends  on  the  per- 


UNIVERSAL  ORDER  477 

duration  and  prosperity  of  conscious  and  reflective  life.  By  "pros- 
perity" I  mean,  not  merely  the  conservation  of  such  life  but,  as 
well,  its  qualitative  increase. 

Thus,  the  order  of  conscious  and  intelligent  life  must  be  the 
key  to  the  ruling  purport  of  the  cosmos,  when  we  think  of  this 
in  terms  of  values.  Thus  the  supreme  principle  of  order  and 
continuity  may  be  properly  described  as  an  overself,  a  super- 
person,  or,  perhaps  better,  a  spiritual  society  or  community  of 
selfhood.  It  must  be  much  more  than  a  self  or  person,  in  the 
sense  in  which  we  immediately  experience  and  reflectively  know 
the  entities  for  which  these  terms  stand.  Each  one  of  us  is  an 
imperfect  spiritual  community  living  in  interpersonal  or  social  re- 
lations. We  can  make  no  hard  and  fast  separation  of  our  intra- 
personal  and  our  interpersonal  lives.  By  analogy,  I  would  de- 
scribe the  supreme  ground  of  values  as  the  perfection  of  selfhood, 
which  is,  by  that  very  fact,  the  perfect  community  or  society. 

Our  hypothesis  is  incapable  of  absolute  proof,  since  such  proof 
would  require  that  we  should  know  the  general  structure  or  char- 
acter of  the  total  cosmos.  It  is  based  on  the  only  kind  of  argu- 
ment which  is  relevant  in  this  case.  If  reality  be  a  cosmos,  order, 
or  system,  it  must  have  a  continuity  of  structure  and  meaning. 
The  realm  of  intelligible  meanings  and  values  cannot  be  abso- 
lutely sundered  from  the  total  character  of  the  real.  The  latter 
cannot  include,  as  a  part  of  itself,  as  an  ephemeral  by-product  of 
its  blind  and  insensate  ongoing,  an  order  of  meanings  and  values 
and  of  life  in  which  these  inhere,  but  to  which  the  total  cosmic 
order  is  utterly  alien  and  hostile.  For,  if  the  cosmos  as  a  whole 
be  a  brute  insensate  procession  of  merely  physical  forces,  it  is 
alien  and  hostile,  simply  because  it  is  indifferent,  to  meanings 
and  values.  Such  a  supposition  makes  the  eruption  and  the  ac- 
tivity and  continuance  of  life  and  its  values,  for  however  brief  a 
moment  in  the  eternities  of  the  cosmic  whirl  of  atoms,  the  most 
unaccountable  and  stupendous  of  miracles.  It  makes  life  the 
momentary  by-product  of  a  lifeless  world,  values  and  meanings 
the  momentary  fermentations  of  a  meaningless  and  valueless 
cosmos.  Since  our  universe  is  a  part  of  the  cosmos,  the  meanings 
and  values  of  life  in  our  universe  must  be  somehow  continuous 
with  the  whole  meaning  and  structure  of  the  cosmos.  Of  course 
we  do  not  and  cannot  know  just  what  transformations  life  and 
its  values  undergo  in  the  total  order ;  but  it  cannot  be  transf orma- 


478  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

tion  to  the  point  of  extinction  of  selfhood  and  its  values ;  it  must 
be  rather  the  continuance  and  increase  of  these. 

The  doctrine  of  absolute  or  singularistic  idealism,  that  all 
finite  selves  are  literally  existential  elements  in  the  absolute  self, 
mind,  or  experient,  is  based  chiefly  on  the  supposed  analogy  be- 
tween mental  systems  (affective,  ideational  and  volitional  com- 
plexes) considered  as  elements  in  the  total  organized  life  of  a 
human  self  or  person,  and  the  life  of  a  human  self  considered  as 
one  constituent  in  the  life  of  the  absolute.  Just  as  I  am  made 
up,  psychically,  of  a  considerable  number  of  fairly  well-organized 
and  distinct  dispositions  which,  in  their  interrelations,  constitute 
my  total  personality,  so  the  absolute  is  made  up  of  all  finite 
selves,  human,  subhuman  and  superhuman,  organized  into  a  unity. 
Just  as  I  am  a  sort  of  society,  so  the  absolute  is  a  super-society. 

On  critical  examination  this  analogy  breaks  down.  In  a 
normal  self  the  various  subsystems  or  ideational  complexes,  which 
constitute  the  dynamic  content  of  the  personality,  have  nothing 
closely  corresponding  to  the  distinctness,  privacy  and  self-determi- 
nation of  the  whole  individual  in  relation  to  other  individuals. 
The  ideational  complexes  are  distinguishable  phases  of  the  self, 
not  distinct  existents.  I  am  an  imperfectly  organized  self,  com- 
pacted of  a  variety  of  impulsive,  emotive  and  ideational  factors. 
Nevertheless,  whatever  degree  of  personality  I  may  be,  that  I  am 
as  one  living  whole — private,  self-determining  and  relatively  self- 
existent.  No  finite  self  is  included  in  me  nor  I  in  any  other,  so 
far  as  I  know.  I  have  facets  to  my  personality,  but,  unless  my 
personality  is  in  a  state  of  disintegration,  I  am  one  self. 

The  diseases  of  personalities  do  not  support  the  absolutist's 
contention.  If  there  are  really  two  or  more  selves  in  one  body, 
then  each  of  these  is  a  distinct  and  self-determining  personality. 
They  do  not  literally  share  in  one  another's  being.  If  they  did 
they  would  cease  to  be  two.  Two  friends  or  lovers,  no  matter 
how  close  their  affinities,  do  not  cease  to  be  two.  If  they  did 
the  meaning  and  zest  of  the  whole  relationship  would  disappear. 
As  a  matter  of  fact  a  dissociated  or  diseased  self  is  not  an  inte- 
grated personality  at  all.10  In  it  the  various  complexes  oscillate 
in  control,  or  some  aberrational  complex  wins  the  upper  hand, 
just  because  of  the  weakness  of  the  function  of  nervous  and  mental 


10  Cf.  Chaps.  25  and  26. 


UNIVERSAL  ORDER  479 

integration.  An  absolute  self  constructed  after  this  analogy  would 
be  a  mere  aggregate  or  warring  collection  of  imperfect  finite 
personalities — not  one  perfectly  unified  and  all-inclusive  self. ' 

We  have  no  sufficient  grounds  for  supposing  that  one  rational 
self  can  be  literally  included  in  another.  A  universal  self,  which 
includes  and  synthesizes  into  a  perfect  unity  the  lives  of  all  im- 
perfect and  changing  selves,  could  not  be  a  self  at  all.  Selves 
exist  only  in  relation  to  other  selves.  An  absolute  which  includes 
and  transmutes  all  finite  selves  is  not  a  self,  and,  in  the  process 
of  transmutation,  the  finite  selves  must  lose  all  that  constitutes 
selfhood.  Thus  the  singularistic  idealist  pays  a  heavy  price  for 
his  one — the  finite  self  dissolves  into  a  phantom,  and  only  by  doing 
violence  to  the  logic  of  experience  can  he  find  his  absolute  self. 

If  there  be  an  over-self  it  must  be  distinct,  in  its  existence, 
from  all  finite  selves  and  they  from  it.  It  must  be  the  creative 
or  originating  and  sustaining  ground  of  the  order  of  the  cosmos 
and  of  the  lives  and  values  of  finite  personalities,  the  conservator 
of  the  order  of  values.  I  can  attach  no  definite  meaning  to  the 
notion  of  an  impersonal  all-inclusive  spirit,  conceived  as  the  suffi- 
cient ground  of  reality  and  values.  Either  there  is  no  cosmos, 
and  no  cosmic  principle  of  order  or  ground  of  values,  or  the  prin- 
ciple and  ground  is  an  over-self,  a  spiritual  community,  of  which 
the  highest  finite  personality  is  our  best  available  adumbration, 
however  imperfect  a  foreshadowing  it  be.  If  there  be  no  over- 
self  then  finite  selves  are  not  only  the  highest  beings  in  the  uni- 
verse, but  they  are  higher  and  worthier  beings  than  the  chaos 
which  has  engendered,  and  will  engulf,  these  paradoxially  tragic 
beings  which  are  able  to  rebel  against,  to  judge  and  condemn,  the 
insensate  welter  of  physicochemical  transformations.  A  single 
human  self  has  more  of  value  in  it  than  an  infinite  chaos  of  atoms 
or  electrons.  To  talk  about  meanings  and  values  inhering  or 
enduring  in  a  so-called  universe  in  which  personalities  are  ac- 
counted merely  transitory  elements  is  to  talk  nonsense.  Conscious 
and  rational  life  must  be  supreme  in  an  intelligible  cosmos. 

Monistic  Theism — the  doctrine  that  all  nature  is  subordinate 
to  one  spiritual  being,  from  which  finite  selves  are  existentially 
distinct,  but  to  which  they  are  similar  in  kind  and  therefore  re- 
lated— is  a  logical  doctrine.  Dualistic  Theism — the  doctrine  that 
there  is  a  recalcitrant  factor,  a  cosmical  obstacle  to  the  full  real- 
ization of  values — is  likewise  a  logical  doctrine  (the  problem  of 


480  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

evil  will  be  discussed  later).  Pantheistic  idealism  and  pantheistic 
naturalism  are,  for  different  reasons,  illogical  and  inconsistent 
theories.  Pantheistic  idealism,  in  its  attempt  to  conserve  the 
meanings  and  values  of  selfhood  by  including  all  selves  in  the 
absolute  self,  sacrifices  selfhood  on  the  altar  of  an  impersonal 
unity,  and  thereby  cuts  the  roots  from  under  all  values. 

Pantheistic  naturalism  invites  us  to  value  and  worship  a  uni- 
verse of  physical  and  unconscious  energies  by  the  application  to 
these  of  the  misleading  honorific  adjective  "infinite."  But,  since 
all  meanings  and  values  must  go  down  to  shipwreck  and  extinction, 
if  personality  be  an  epiphenomenon,  the  so-called  universe  of  the 
naturalist  is  unworthy  of  valuation  and  reverence.  In  such  case, 
if  we  still  must  worship,  let  us  worship  man.  For,  weak  and 
erring  though  he  be,  man  is  worthier  than  an  infinite  and  eternal 
blind  whirl  of  energies,  since  he  alone  can  feel  and  think  and 
will  and  dream — alone  can  invent  and  serve  truth,  justice,  love, 
and  beauty. 

APPENDIX 

THE  MEANINGS  OF  THE  INFINITE 

The  word  "infinite,"  like  many  other  philosophical  terms,  covers 
a  number  of  equivocations.     The  following  are  its  chief  meanings : 

1.  The  indefinitely  great,  that  which  is  greater  than  any  assign- 
able quantity,  in  magnitude,  number,  duration  or  intensity.  When 
people  speak  of  infinite  space,  force,  time,  or  of  one  entity  as  being 
infinitely  better  than  another,  what  they  have  in  mind  is  inability 
to  measure.  What  they  really  mean  is  "indefinitely"  larger,  greater, 
longer,  better,  etc. 

2.  The  second  meaning  of  the  infinite  is  the  unlimited,  the  un- 
bounded; for  example  the  absolute  boundlessness  of  space,  the  abso- 
lute endlessness  of  time,  the  absolute  inexhaustibleness  of  energy,  the 
endless  duration  of  life. 

3.  The  infinite  as  the  perfect  or  self  -complete ;  as  including  all 
forms  of  values  in  the  highest  degree  possible.  In  this,  which  is 
peculiarly  the  metaphysical,  meaning  of  the  infinite  there  can  be 
of  course  only  one  infinite,  the  absolute  reality  or  ground  of  the 
universe  in  its  unity  and  totality.  The  infinite  in  this  sense  of  per- 
fection and  self-completeness  would  be  wholly  self-active  and  self- 
contained;  in  short  perfect  in  power,  knowledge  or  insight  and  feel- 
ing. There  could  be  for  it  no  opaque  facts,  no  unattainable  desires, 
no  gaps  between  will  and  deed,  no  irresolvable  disharmonies. 


UNIVERSAL  ORDER  481 

The  infinite  as  the  indefinitely  great  is  nothing  actual.  It  is 
simply  a  misleading  expression  for  vagueness  in  human  thinking 
and  incapacity  to  measure  or  estimate.  No  matter  how  vast  the 
actual  magnitude  of  the  space  world,  of  the  number  of  elements  in 
it,  or  of  the  differences  of  degree  in  quality,  all  these  things  must  be 
finite  in  the  sense  of  being  definite  in  quantity,  number,  and  rela- 
tion. Nothing  that  exists  in  time  strictly  speaking  can  be  endless. 
Anything  that  may  exist  endlessly,  exists  eternally,  is  a  timeless 
existence. 

Since  space  is  not  a  kind  of  separate  existence,  but  the  system 
of  relations  between  contemporaneous  existents,  space  in  itself  can- 
not be  actually  boundless  nor  bounded.  The  whole  of  reality  can- 
not exist  in  space.  Nor  can  reality  actually  consist  now  of  innu- 
merable entities,  for  an  innumerable  number  is  not  a  real  number. 
The  real  elements  of  the  universe  must,  at  any  moment,  be  a  definite 
and  actual  number.  The  proposition  that  there  actually  exists  an 
id  finite  number  of  things  is  tantamount  to  saying  that  the  world 
is  in  endless  process  of  change,  so  that  incessantly  things  come  into 
being  and  cease  to  be.  An  unreal  number  or  an  endless  series  means 
that  at  any  moment  there  is  a  finite  number  of  things  and  a  series 
that  is  never  to  be  completed.  Since  space  is  the  system  of  relations 
between  simultaneously  existing  things,  and  since  the  latter  must  at 
any  instant  be  an  actual  or  finite  number,  space  is  finite.  Since  time  is 
the  form  of  change,  the  relation  of  succession  and  every  change  and 
succession  is  finite,  the  actual  endlessness  or  infinitude  of  time  is  a 
misleading  way  of  asserting  the  reality  of  eternal  or  changeless  being. 
Whether  belief  in  the  reality  of  eternal  being  is  consistent  with  the 
temporal  character  of  our  actual  world  is  a  question  which  I  will 
discuss  fully  in  Chapter  XXXVII. 

The  "new  infinite"  of  mathematical  speculation  is  frequently  put 
forward  as  affording  a  definite  solution  of  the  philosophical  problem 
of  the  infinite.  I  shall  discuss  this  new  infinite  very  briefly,  for  the 
purpose  of  showing  that  it  does  not  solve  the  problem  of  the  actual 
infinite  in  the  sense  of  the  reality  of  self-completeness  or  perfection.11 

The  "new  infinite"  is  a  new  definition  of  infinity  derived  from 


11  From  the  large  and  growing  literature  on  this  subject  I  select  for 
reference,  B.  Eussell,  Our  Knowledge  of  the  External  World,  Chaps.  6  and  7; 
and  Mysticism  and  Logic,  pp.  84  ff. ;  Eussell  and  Whitehead,  Principles  of 
Mathematics  (see  index);  L.  Couturat,  L'Infini  Mathematique ;  B.  Eussell, 
Introduction  to  Mathematical  Phisosophy  ;  Josiah  Eoyce,  The  World  and  the 
Individual,  Vol.  I,  Supplementary  Essay;  H.  Poincare,  The  Value  of  Science, 
and  Science  and  Method;  William  James,  Some  Problems  of  Philosophy,  Chaps. 
10  and  11;  and  my  article  on  "The  Infinite  New  and  Old,"  Philosophical 
Beview,  Vol.  xiii,  pp.  497-513;  J.  S.  Mackenzie,  Elements  of  Constructive 
Philosophy,  Bk.  iii,  Chap.  3. 


482  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

the  property  of  number  series.  All  number  series  are  indefinitely 
continuable  series  growing  according  to  perfectly  defined  laws  of 
order.  Take,  for  example,  the  series  of  positive  whole  numbers,  the 
series  of  even  numbers,  and  the  series  of  numbers  which  are  squares 
of  the  whole  numbers : 

0,  1,  2,  3,  4 n 

0,  2,  4,  6,  8 n 

0,  1,  4,  9,  16 n 

The  other  two  series  are  contained  in  the  first  series  but  to  every 
number  in  the  first  series  is  a  corresponding  number  in  the  other 
series,  since  all  the  series  are  endless.  The  series  are  in  one-one 
correspondence.  Thus  an  infinite  whole  is  one  which  corresponds  to 
a  proper  part  of  itself.  Any  class  is  infinite  if  its  parts  are  numer- 
ically similar  to  itself.  Such  groups  of  series  are  endlessly  self- 
representative  ;  each  member  of  the  group  represents  the  whole  group 
of  series  adequately.  Thus,  as  Kussell  tells  us,  infinite  numbers 
differ  from  finite  numbers  in  two  respects.  First,  an  infinite  number 
is  not  increased  by  adding  one  to  it.  Given  an  infinite  collection, 
any  finite  collection  may  be  added  to  or  taken  away  from  it  without 
increasing  or  diminishing  the  number  of  the  whole,  as  in  the  number 
series  given  above.  Second,  since  all  finite  numbers  are  increased 
by  the  addition  of  one,  the  principle  of  mathematical  induction 
holds  good  of  finite  numbers  but  not  of  infinite  numbers. 

The  similarity  or  one-one  correspondence  between  whole  and  part 
in  the  new  infinite  solves,  it  is  said,  Zeno's  paradox  of  the  Achilles 
and  the  other  classical  problems  of  the  infinitesimal.  The  path  trav- 
ersed by  the  tortoise  in  a  given  time  is  a  part  of  the  path  traversed 
by  Achilles  in  the  same  time;  thus  there  is  a  one-one  correspondence 
between  the  infinite  number  of  points  in  each  stride  of  Achilles  and 
each  step  of  the  tortoise;  therefore  Achilles  can  overtake  the  tortoise. 
But  this  explanation  assumes,  as  James  pointed  out,  that  an  infinite 
number  of  points  has  in  both  cases  been  traversed  in  finite  time, 
whereas  the  real  problem  is  as  to  how  any  being  can  pass  through 
an  infinite  number  of  points  in  a  finite  time.  The  way  out  of  this 
difficulty  is  to  say  that  the  finite  stretch  of  time  consists  in  an 
infinite  number  of  instants  corresponding  to  the  infinite  number  of 
points  in  the  different  stretches  traversed  by  Achilles  and  the  tortoise. 
But  all  these  instants  are  timeless.  They  cannot  by  addition  consti- 
tute a  finite  stretch  of  time,  any  more  than  an  infinite  number  of 
zeroes  can  constitute  a  positive  finite  quantity.  As  James  says,  whoso 
actually  traverses  a  continuum  can  do  so  by  no  process  continuous  in 
the  mathematical  sense.    Be  it  short  or  long,  each  step  in  the  journey 


UNIVERSAL  ORDER  483 

must  be  occupied  in  its  due  order  of  succession.  If  the  steps  are 
necessarily  infinite  in  number,  their  end  can  never  be  reached,  for 
the  remainder  in  this  kind  of  process  is  just  what  one  cannot  neglect. 
By  the  method  of  one-one  correspondence  neither  Achilles  nor  the 
tortoise  would  ever  get  in  motion  at  all.  The  only  solution  is  to 
say  with  M.  Bergson  that  each  step  is  an  indivisible  movement  and 
every  real  time  a  finite  duration.  Mathematical  time  is  a  generic 
concept  for  all  finite  durations,  mathematical  distance  a  generic  con- 
cept for  all  finite  distances,  mathematical  motion  a  generic  concept 
for  all  finite  motions.  There  are  no  actual  infinitesimals  in  space, 
motion,  and  time. 

The  various  number  series  are  not  equal  in  numerical  magnitude 
at  any  stage  in  the  indefinitely  continued  operation  of  enumerating 
them.  They  are  never  actual  infinites.  They  are  endlessly  growing 
finites;  in  other  words  they  are  perfectly  well-defined  formulas  for 
the  indefinite  continuance  of  recurrent  operations  of  thought.  Writers 
such  as  Dedekind  and  Royce  conceive  the  positive  nature  of  the 
infinite  to  be  the  capacity  for  endless  self-representation,  of  which 
number  series  form  striking  examples.  Imagine  a  map  of  a  country 
situated  in  a  certain  part  of  the  country;  then  to  be  perfect  the  map 
should  contain  a  map  of  itself  and  so  on  endlessly.  But  this  is  a 
process  of  self-representation  which  can  never  be  completed.  Like 
the  number  series,  it  is  a  case  of  the  indefinite  recurrence  of  an 
operation  which  can  never  actually  be  completed.  Dedekind  draws 
from  the  mind's  power  of  self-representation  the  proof  that  there 
actually  exist  such  infinite  systems.12  But  such  an  argument,  to  be 
valid,  would  have  to  assume  that  in  one's  self-consciousness  one  could 
represent  wholly  and  completely  the  whole  series  of  thoughts  possible 
through  endless  time.  An  omniscient  thinker,  to  be  actually  infinite 
in  thought,  would  have  to  possess  a  sun-clear  intuition  of  all  possible 
objects  of  thought.  Thus  the  human  type  of  complete  self -repre- 
sentation would  be,  in  an  endless  series  of  self-representations,  end- 
less in  the  sense  of  never-completed;  but  not  an  act  of  intellectual 
intuition  in  which  a  being  should  grasp  all  at  once  in  a  single  in- 
sight all  the  possible  objects  of  his  thoughts  and  their  relationships. 
The  human  mind's  power  of  self-representation  is  finite  in  two  senses 
■ — (1)  it  never  completely  and  translucently  penetrates  all  the  objects 
of  its  thought;  (2)  at  any  moment  the  objects  of  its  actual  thought 
are  but  a  small  selection  from  the  possible  objects  of  thought.  A 
perfect  self-representation  would  not  be  a  representation  at  all,  but 
an  intuitive  penetration  and  comprehension  of  the  whole  universe  of 


M   See  Dedekind:    Essays  on  Number. 


484  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

not-self  in  self.  The  actual  infinite,  if  such  there  be,  must  be  a  being 
self-complete  and  perfect,  self-existent,  self-contained,  self-moving. 
Such  a  being  would  be  infinite  in  power  in  the  sense  that  he  would 
be  unhindered  and  unlimited  by  any  power  independent  of  himself 
in  its  origin  and  existence;  infinite  in  knowledge  in  the  sense  that 
there  would  be  no  data  or  facts  through  which  his  insight  would 
not  completely  penetrate  and  which  would  not  blend  in  the  totality 
of  his  insight;  infinite  in  goodness  in  the  sense  that  there  would  be 
in  his  willing  or  self-activity  no  conflict  of  motives,  no  opposition 
between  desire  and  volition. 

There  is  a  distinction  between  self-completeness  and  perfection. 
A  finite  being  or  even  a  work  of  art  may  be  perfect  after  its  kind, 
but  only  the  infinite  universe  can  be  self-complete.  If,  however,  we 
take  perfection  to  mean  the  absence  of  defect  or  limitation,  no  finite 
being  can  attain  perfection. 

The  metaphysical  infinite  may  be  conceived  theistically,  pan- 
theistically  or  pluralistically.  For  theism  God  is  the  one  self-com- 
plete being  who  includes  all  forms  of  perfection.  He  has  an  inner 
life  which  transcends  the  life  of  the  world.  The  world  is  derived 
from  and  dependent  upon  Him;  nothing  in  it  can  take  place  inde- 
pendently of  His  will,  but  He  may  by  an  act  of  self -limitation  endow 
finite  selves  with  a  limited  power  to  choose  and  hence  to  err.  From 
this  standpoint  the  imperfection  in  the  world,  its  suffering  and  evil, 
are  elements  in  the  divine  plan.  These  defects  do  not  constitute 
limitations  imposed  upon  God,  but  are  factors  in  the  order  of  the 
universe  which,  as  the  expression  of  God's  perfection,  must  as  a 
whole  be  good,  however  imperfect  its  parts. 

The  pantheistic  infinite  is  the  identification  of  the  absolute  or 
perfect  being  with  the  wholly  immanent  spirit  of  the  universe.  God, 
the  one  being  absolutely  infinite  as  Spinoza  puts  it,  is  identical  with 
the  whole  indwelling  principle  of  totality  or  unity  by  virtue  of  which 
the  universe  is  a  universe  and  not  a  mere  heap  or  aggregate  of  un- 
related parts.  In  other  words  the  infinite  is  the  principle  of  cosmic 
unity,  the  dens  sive  natura,  of  Spinoza.  When  the  pantheist  conceives 
a  cosmic  unity  as  being,  not  an  impersonal  principle  of  unity,  but 
a  personal  or  superpersonal  principle,  he  has  passed  beyond  pan- 
theism. For  a  self-conscious  center  essentially  transcends,  in  its 
inner  life,  all  others,  however  intimate  its  relation  to  its  others. 

If  the  universe  be  conceived,  as  it  is  for  example  by  Mr.  J.  M. 
E.  McTaggart,13  as  an  eternal  system  or  society  of  finite  beings,  who 
are  fundamental  differentiations  of  the  absolute,  we  have  an  infinite 


11  See  his  Studies  in  Hegelian  Cosmology  and  Some  Problems  of  Beligion. 


UNIVERSAL  ORDER  485 

which  consists  of  a  permanent  system  of  finite  beings  in  relation — 
one  infinite  which  is  the  impersonal  unity  of  a  plurality  of  persons. 
Thus  we  have  a  synthesis  of  singularism  and  pluralism.  This 
synthesis  is  the  only  logical  form  of  pantheism.  For  either  the 
infinite,  as  the  principle  of  cosmic  unity,  is  a  self  which  transcends 
all  the  finite  members  of  whose  relations  it  is  the  ground,  or  it  is  an 
impersonal  principle  of  unity.  The  logic  of  Spinoza's  pantheism  or 
of  Hegel's,  if  indeed  Hegel  was  a  pantheist,  requires  some  such  con- 
ception as  that  of  Dr.  McTaggart. 


CHAPTER  XXXVI 

FINITE    SELVES    AND    THE    OVER-SELF 

In  the  previous  chapter  we  rejected  the  notion  that  an  im- 
personal ground  of  the  world  could  be  the  ground  of  personality 
and  value.  We  also  rejected  the  notion  that  the  cosmic  ground 
could  be  a  person  which  literally  contains,  as  parts  of,  or  elements 
in,  its  experience,  all  finite  selves.  We  denied  that  a  person  could 
be  a  mere  fragment  of  another  person.  But  how  can  finite  per- 
sons have  any  existence  of  their  own,  if  they  are  dependent  on 
the  cosmic  ground  ?  And  how  can  the  cosmic  ground  be  a  unity 
if  it  be  not  impersonal  ?  These  are  problems  of  exceeding  great 
importance  and  difficulty  which  we  must  consider. 

I  have  called  the  cosmic  ground  an  over-self.  This  means  that 
while  it  contains,  in  a  more  eminent  sense,  what  we  mean  by 
personality,  it  must  be  superpersonal;  it  must  transcend  finite 
selfhood.  Perhaps  we  shall  find  the  best  clue  to  reconcile  the  im- 
manence of  the  over-self  in  nature  and  man  with  the  transcendence 
that  must  belong  to  it,  if  it  be  not  impersonal  but  superpersonal, 
if  we  suppose  that  the  over-self  is  the  union  in  higher  degree  of 
what  we  mean  by  "Personality"  and  "Community." 

First,  a  few  words  on  the  immanence  of  spirit  in  nature. 

I  remind  the  reader  here  of  the  argument  developed  in  previ- 
ous chapters  that  the  aesthetic  emotion  of  kinship  with  nature 
(of  which  the  feelings  of  beauty,  picturesqueness,  grandeur  and 
sublimity,  with  which  one  contemplates  the  varied  aspects  of 
nature  as  living  wholes  of  individual  significance  are  phases)  con- 
stitutes an  important  ground  for  belief  in  a  spirit  immanent  in 
nature.  Since  man  feels  a  harmony  between  himself  and  nature, 
when  the  latter  is  perceived  as  a  living  and  significant  whole,  the 
scientific  analysis  of  nature  can  do  no  more  than  lay  bare,  at  best, 
the  skeleton  of  the  world.  The  flesh  and  blood  of  nature's  living 
individuality  is  apprehended  only  through  the  concrete  poetic  in- 
tuition of  the  nature  lover.  In  the  sesthetic  emotion  man  enters 
into  immediate  communion  with  the  spiritual  life  expressed  in 

486 


FINITE  SELVES  AND  OVER-SELF  487 

the  natural  order.  There  is  no  necessary  inconsistency  between 
the  scientific  conceptions  of  nature  and  the  intuitions  of  the 
nature  lover.  Scientific  analysis,  properly  understood,  enhances 
man's  aesthetic  relations  to  nature,  since  it  deepens  and  clarifies 
his  immediate  sense  of  nature's  meanings.  On  the  other  hand, 
the  aesthetic  contemplation  of  nature  clothes  the  abstract  skeleton 
of  scientific  concepts  with  the  rich  qualitative  variety,  individual- 
ity, and  living  harmony  of  concrete  intuition.  Perceptual  ex- 
perience takes  on  its  full  meaning  only  when  it  is  suffused  by 
aesthetic  feeling.  The  poets  are  not  vain  dreamers  of  subjective 
fancies,  and  there  need  be  no  quarrel  between  science  and  poetry. 
Scientific  analysis  of  nature  furnishes  the  intellectual  framework 
of  a  more  meaningful  and  profound  poetic  integration  of  nature 
in  its  spiritual  character.  The  total  and  immediate  intuition  of 
the  nature-lover  sees  the  scientific  framework  filled  with  life  and 
value.  The  aesthetic  communion  of  man  with  nature  is  unintel- 
ligible on  any  other  hypothesis  than  that  nature,  in  its  individual 
forms  and  its  totality,  is  the  self-manifestation  of  spirit. 

But  how  can  an  over-self  or  superperson  be  conceived  to  be 
immanent  in  human  nature,  since  the  human  person  seems  in 
essence  to  exclude  the  immanence  in  it  of  any  other  self?  Is 
there  any  sense  in  which  it  might  be  said  that  one  personal  spirit 
is  immanent  in  another  without  absorbing  that  other  into  its  inner 
being?  I  think  there  is.  First,  let  us  consider  in  what  sense  a 
human  person  can  not  be  a  part  of  an  absolute  self. 

Finite  selves  are  never  perfect  personalities.  We  are  partly 
things  and  partly  persons.  As  things  enmeshed  in  the  system  of 
the  spatial-dynamic  world,  we  are  eddies  in  the  physical  con- 
tinuum, local  and  temporal  centers  in  the  universal  motion-system 
of  the  material  universe.  As  things  we  are  insubstantial  imper- 
manent pseudo-individuals.  As  things  we  are  transitory  modi- 
fications of  the  flowing  cosmical  energies  which  are  the  manifes- 
tations of  the  world  will. 

Finite  selves  in  their  truer  and  inner  being  are  not  mere  frag- 
ments of  a  whole,  not  mere  bits  of  an  absolute  continuum.  In 
their  inner  being  they  are  severally  real  and  unique — self-feeling, 
self-determining  centers  of  experience  and  deed.  In  this  regard 
finite  selves  cannot  be  mere  contents  of  an  infinite  and  absolute 
self.  The  will  of  a  finite  self  is  not  a  bit  of  the  absolute  will. 
The  consciousness  of  a  finite  self  is  not  a  mere  content  of  an  ab- 


488  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

solute  consciousness.  Nearly  all  the  arguments  of  the  absolute 
monist  or  singularist  on  this  score  involve  the  fallacious  assump- 
tion that  to  know  anything  truly  and  wholly  one  must  be  that 
which  one  knows,  that  to  feel  utter  sympathy  one  must  be  the 
person  one  sympathizes  with,  that  to  cooperate  in  willing,  one's 
own  will  must  be  existentially  identical  with  the  will  with  which 
one  cooperates ;  and,  in  brief,  that  to  be  truly  related  to  anything 
one  must  be  part  of  that  to  which  one  is  related.  It  is  assumed 
that,  if  the  supreme  self  know  and  sympathize  with  my  life,  or 
I  with  his  life,  we  must  really  be  the  same  self.  I  must,  then, 
as  knower,  sympathizer,  or  cooperating  will,  be  part  of  the  su- 
preme self,  and  he  must  be  fragmentary  identical  with  me. 

If  finite  selves  are  parts  of  the  over:self  and  nothing  more,  such 
a  being  in  all  his  knowing  knows  only  himself,  in  all  his  willing 
wills  only  himself,  in  all  his  love  loves  only  himself.  If  this  were 
true  then  the  over-self  would  not  be  a  person  in  any  sense  that 
is  intelligible  to  human  beings.  A  self  that  has  no  objects  of 
knowledge  but  himself  cannot  be  truly  self-conscious,  since  selves 
are  conscious  only  in  relation  to  an  "other,"  self  or  thing.  If  I 
have  only  my  actual  self  to  love  I  cannot  be  said  truly  to  love. 
If  I  will  nothing  but  my  actual  self  I  do  not  will  anything. 

The  assumption  of  the  numerical  identity,  the  existential 
fusion,  of  related  selves  does  not  hold  good  in  human  relationships, 
and  therefore  one  cannot  understand  how  it  can  hold  good  for 
the  relationships  of  the  human  self  to  a  supreme  self.  Finite 
selves  are  not  lost  and  merged  in  one  another's  lives,  by  growing 
into  an  understanding  and  appreciation  of  one  another's  experi- 
ence. A  person  does  not  cease  to  be  individual,  by  the  deepening 
and  expansion  of  his  insight  and  his  sympathies.  My  will  is  not 
become  identical  with  your  will  because  we  will  in  harmony.  Two 
friends  do  not  cease  to  be  two  by  virtue  of  the  complete  reciprocity 
of  their  friendship.  Even  "two  hearts  that  beat  as  one,  two  souls 
with  but  a  single  thought"  do  not  merge  in  a  higher  impersonal 
identity.  If  they  did  all  the  zest  of  their  so  feeling  and  thinking 
would  disappear.  Love  is  an  expansion  of  individuality  through 
relationship,  not  a  disappearance  of  individuality. 

The  actuality  and  possibility  of  all  sorts  of  relationships  be- 
tween selves,  as  members  of  a  systematic  whole,  does  not  imply 
that  selves  are  merely  elements  in  an  absolute  self  or  impersonal 
spirit.     If  it  were  so,  as  the  singularistic  absolutist  asserts,  we 


FINITE  SELVES  AND  OVER-SELF  489 

could  be  haters,  murderers,  lovers,  saviors,  neighbors,  mothers-in- 
law,  and  so  on  through  the  entire  gamut  of  human  relationships, 
only  because  we  are  all  alike  parts  of  the  absolute.  All  our  sep- 
arate finite  experiences  would  be  merged  in  the  all-devouring  maw 
of  the  absolute  experience,  but  as  to  how  and  what  became  of 
them  in  the  absolute  we  could  have  no  inkling. 

I  feel  a  pain,  am  in  error,  tell  a  lie,  fall  in  love,  and  so  on 
through  the  gamut  of  human  experience.  My  experiences  cannot 
enter  into  an  absolute  experience  as  constituent  elements  thereof 
without  being  altered.  If  I  am  really  nothing  but  a  part  of  an 
absolute,  my  finite,  erring  selfhood  has  no  reality  of  its  own. 
My  sense  of  unique  selfhood  is  an  illusion.  On  the  other  hand, 
if  one  recognize  that  the  finite  self  is  real  as  such,  it  may  be 
known  to  a  supreme  knower,  both  as  it  is  for  itself  and  as  it  is 
for  him.  I  may  in  some  degree  know  you  both  as  you  think  you 
are  and  as  I  think  you  are  in  contrast  with  what  you  think  your- 
self to  be.  If  I  can  know  and  harmoniously  share  my  friend's 
feelings  and  thoughts  without  being  that  friend,  surely  a  supreme 
self  might  know  us  all  without  our  merging  into  him ! 

Since,  in  the  matter  of  conscious  experience,  to  be  is  to  be 
felt  or  known  in  some  way,  if  my  being  be  real  only  in  and  for 
the  all-knower,  then  my  being  as  I  am  for  myself  is  unreal.  But 
since  to  feel  is  to  be  as  an  experient,  my  conscious  being  as  it -is 
for  me  in  my  personal  feeling  must  be  real  in  some  degree.  For 
the  time  being  I  am  as  "good"  a  reality  as  anything  whatsoever. 
To  make  finite  selfhood  simply  a  constituent  element,  existing 
no  one  knows  how,  in  the  experience  of  the  absolute  self,  is  to 
"de-realize"  the  finite  self,  and  to  put  in  its  place  an  empty 
abstraction.  For,  if  my  feelings  and  purposes,  as  I  have  them, 
are  not  real,  what  actual  basis  is  left  for  determining  the  char- 
acter of  an  ultimate  reality  obtained  by  merging  and  losing  all 
finite  selves  in  an  abstract  absolute  unity?  There  is  no  more 
ground  for  assuming  the  existential  oneness  of  a  finite  person 
and  a  supreme  self  than  there  is  for  admitting  the  existential 
identity  of  two  finite  persons — no  ground  at  all,  in  short. 

Finite  selves  enter  into  a  great  variety  of  relationships — 
spatial  and  temporal,  affectional,  volitional,  and  cognitive.  They 
may  likewise  be  in  a  variety  of  relationships  to  the  supreme  self. 
They  may  be  ignorant  of  him,  indifferent  to  him,  hostile,  friendly 
or  devoted. 


490  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

The  universe  of  persons,  which  alone  realizes  the  mean- 
ings and  intrinsic  values  to  which  the  universes  of  insentient 
nature  and  of  organic  nature  are  tributary,  is  a  society  of  selves. 
The  supreme  self,  if  such  exist,  must  be  the  ultimate  example  and 
type  of  selfhood,  the  source  and  sustainer  of  the  intrinsic  values 
of  the  society  of  finite  selves,  and  also  the  unifier  and  director  of 
nature,  which  is,  in  turn,  the  theater  for  the  realization  of  finite 
selfhood.  Finite  selves  may  indefinitely  progress  in  their  degrees 
of  inner  harmony  of  will  and  insight,  and  proportionately  prog- 
ress in  their  harmony  with  the  supreme  self.  We  know  and  feel 
and  act  with  other  selves  because  of  a  community  of  character — 
a  community  of  spirit,  of  ideals,  and  purposes.  The  ultimate 
source  of  this  rational  and  ethical  community  of  life  must  be  the 
supreme  source  of  selfhood.  We  know  nature  as  the  theater  and 
instrumentality  of  human  social  and  personal  life.  It  is  the 
meeting  place  of  selves,  the  medium  of  their  interactions  and 
intercommunions.  The  unity  and  interconnection  of  nature  with 
selves,  and  of  selves  with  one  another,  points  us  to  the  concep- 
tion of  the  ultimate  ground  of  order  as  the  great  other  spirit  or 
over-self,  who  sustains  the  order  of  nature  and  the  order  of  hu- 
manity, and  progressively  manifests  himself  as  creative  source, 
in  the  ascending  scale  of  individualities  from  the  material  indi- 
viduum  or  center  of  physical  activity  up  to  the  most  fully  har- 
monized rational  and  social  selfhood. 

The  extreme  singularist  and  the  extreme  pluralist  are  alike 
guilty  of  the  same  fallacy  in  their  treatment  of  selfhood,  that  of 
assuming  that  the  uniqueness  and  individuality  of  a  finite  self 
involves  its  absolute  impenetrability.  They  conceive  the  finite 
self  as  a  self-enclosed  particular.  The  singularist  asserts  that,  if 
the  finite  self  has  any  independent  being  it  must  be  wholly  im- 
pervious to  relationships ;  and  therefore  the  world  is  a  chaos  unless 
all  so-called  finite  selves  are  mere  fragments  of  an  absolute  self. 
If  there  be  more  than  one  ultimately  real  self  there  is  chaos,  says 
the  monistic  absolutist. 

The  extreme  pluralist  asserts  equally  that  selves  are  mutually 
impenetrable  and  that  their  relations  are  wholly  external,  there- 
fore selves  cannot  form  an  organized  whole  of  communicating 
lives.  Each  one  is  forever  shut  up  tight  in  his  own  skin.  Thus 
we  have  Leibniz's  "windowless  monads" ;  and,  then,  in  order  to 
explain   their  relations,   the   artificial   and    inconsistent,    though 


FINITE  SELVES  AND  OVER-SELF  491 

necessary,  hypothesis  of  a  supreme  governing  monad  who  is  the 
ground  of  the  preestablished  harmony  of  activities  among  the 
monads. 

In  contrast  with  both  these  positions,  the  truer  view  starts 
from  the  principle  that  selves,  though  existentially  distinct  cen- 
ters of  feeling  and  deed,  are  not  shut  out  from  one  another's  lives 
by  impenetrable  and  unscalable  walls.  The  kinds  and  degrees  of 
intimacy  of  relations  between  selves  are  various.  We  cannot 
enumerate  all  the  types  of  mediate,  intermediate,  and  immediate 
relationships,  not  only  because  these  are  at  any  moment  so  nu- 
merous and  complex  but  also  because,  in  a  dynamic  universe,  re- 
lationships change  and  evolve  with  the  evolution  of  the  elements 
of  reality. 

It  is  passing  strange  that  this  erroneous  theory  of  the  mutual 
impenetrability,  the  ultimate  incommunicability,  of  selves  should 
be  advanced  by  some  who  would  justify  a  religious  view  of  reality. 
For  the  deepest  and,  philosophically,  the  most  defensible  type  of 
religious  life  is  an  enlightened  mysticism  which  finds  and  feels 
the  working  of  the  cosmical  spirit  in  the  life  of  inner  personal 
experience;  and  in  the  course  of  man's  spiritual  history  traces, 
by  the  light  of  this  immediate  living  presence  to  the  individual 
soul,  the  growing  manifestation  of  that  spirit.  Such  a  mysticism 
is  intellectually  justified  by  its  close  analogy  with  the  aesthetic 
experience  and  the  higher  interpersonal  emotions.  Historically, 
it  is  justified  by  the  part  which  it  has  played  in  the  work  of 
prophets  and  reformers,  in  the  rejuvenescence  and  purification  of 
religions.  If  its  validity  cannot  be  proved  to  those  who  have  felt 
no  touch  of  it,  on  the  other  hand,  no  new  discoveries  of  natural 
science  or  historical  criticism  can  invalidate  it.  Moreover,  the 
presumption  is  that  those  who  have  it  not  at  all  are  deficient  or 
blind  in  the  matter  of  a  worthful  and  significant  experience,  as 
are  those  who  have  no  eyes  for  the  beauties  of  nature,  or  no 
hearts  for  friendship  and  love. 

The  doctrine  of  the  absolute  impenetrability  of  selves  is  then 
an  error.  We  finite  selves  are  separated  by  our  bodies.  We  are 
kept  apart  still  more  by  our  cross-purposes  and  conflicting  desires, 
by  our  self-will,  our  stupid  blindness  and  lack  of  sympathetic  and 
rational  insight.  But  we  are  never  wholly  kept  apart.  Friends 
and  lovers  do  live  in  and  through  one  another.  We  do  at  times 
seem  to  have  immediate  and  vivid  insight  into  one  another's  inner 


492  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

li/es.  We  are  able  to  merge  our  narrow,  blind,  egotistical  lives 
in  other  lives  of  sympathetic  insight  and  self-forgetting  devotion. 
We  can  and  do  save  ourselves  as  rational  and  spiritual  persons 
by  dying  to  our  exclusive  and  blindly  irrational  biological  self- 
hood. Indeed,  immediate  intuition  or  insight  is  the  normal  man- 
ner of  knowing  another  self.  We  do  not  first  observe  the  motions 
of  another  body  and  then,  by  a  deliberate  process  of  inference, 
project  a  mental  self  into  it.  This  explanation  of  the  way  in 
which  one  self  knows  another  is  a  construction  of  the  psychologist 
and  epistemologist.  Immediate  knowledge  comes  first,  differen- 
tiation and  analysis  afterwards.  Hound-about  inferential  knowl- 
edge of  other  selves  is  intermediate  between  naive  immediate 
insight,  and  the  higher  insight  based  on  community  of  ideas  and 
sentiments  amongst  peers. 

St.  John  and  St.  Paul,  St.  John  of  the  Cross,  Meister  Eck- 
hart  and  Jacob  Boehme,  Spinoza,  Fichte  and  Hegel,  Shelley, 
Wordsworth,  Tennyson  and  Browning,  and  many  another  mystical 
poet,  seer,  and  philosopher  may  have  been  right  in  affirming  the 
intercommunicability  of  selves. 

In  normal  life  the  tremendous  and  generally  unnoticed  influ- 
ence of  suggestion,  the  divining  by  friend  and  lover  of  another's 
attitude  of  feeling  and  thought,  the  whole  swift  immediacy  of 
psychical  rapport  on  which  the  interest  and  zest  of  our  intimate 
social  intercourse  so  much  depend — all  point  to  the  intercom- 
municability of  personal  life  as  an  integral  part  of  the  goal  of 
selfhood.  No  wonder  that,  hampered  as  we  seem  to  be  by  our 
bodies,  differing  as  we  do  in  the  varied  play  of  our  stresses  in 
language  and  gestures,  with  conflicting  interests  and  cross  pur- 
poses, our  lives  often  seem  wholly  private  and  isolated.  And  yet 
probably  every  self  hungers  at  times  to  lay  itself  bare  before 
some  other  self,  to  throw  away  its  masks  and  be  its  own  naked 
reality,  however  scarred  and  specked,  in  the  sympathetic  presence 
of  some  other  loving  and  forgiving  self.  As  selves  grow  in  ration- 
ality of  insight,  in  universality  of  outlook  and  aim,  in  sympathy 
and  wisdom,  they  become  more  and  more  intercommunicative. 

In  brief,  in  the  most  intimate  and  significant  human  relation- 
ships, the  spirit  of  one  person  may  be  immanent  in  another  with- 
out either  losing  their  distinctness.  After  years  of  happy  wedded 
life  a  man  and  woman  will  each  show  the  working  of  the  other's 
spirit  without  either  losing  their  own   individuality.     Indeed,  the 


FINITE  SELVES  AND  OVER-SELF  493 

better  the  union  the  more  genial  the  atmosphere  for  the  develop- 
ment of  the  essential  personality.  The  like  is  true  in  deep  and 
lasting  friendships.  And  are  not  the  spirits  of  the  creative  heroes 
of  the  spirit — of  poets  and  sages,  of  prophets  and  revealers,  of 
great  lovers  of  their  kind  and  great  lovers  of  beauty  and  truth 
— immanent  in  kindred  spirits  through  all  time?  Are  not  the 
spirits  of  Plato,  Jesus,  Gotama,  Socrates,  Virgil,  Shakespeare, 
Spinoza,  Goethe,  alive  as  immanent  in  these  who  are  inspired  by 
them  throughout  the  ages  ? 

If  the  above  be  literal  fact,  as  I  believe,  then  we  may  carry 
the  argument  on  and  say — the  over-self,  the  superpersonal  spirit 
is  immanent  in  humanity  in  the  sense  that,  as  men  respond  to  the 
incitements  and  materials  for  spiritual  development  that  his  ever 
energizing  life  offers  to  them,  they  become  partial  incarnations  of 
his  spirit. 

The  supreme  spirit  would  then  be  the  conservator  of  all  the 
intrinsic  values  of  selfhood — the  self  for  whom  all  truth  is  valid, 
in  whose  purposive  will  perfect  goodness  is  embodied,  of  whose 
creative  life  beauty  is  the  adequate  expression.  In  the  supreme 
self  the  so-called  eternal  truths,  which  are  adumbrated  in  our 
finite  minds  by  the  principles  of  logic  and  mathematics,  and  by 
whatever  other  principles  of  truth  there  may  be,  are  the  laws  of 
Operation  of  his  creative  thinking.  Similarly,  the  values  of  good- 
ness must  be  directive  principles  of  his  activity.  The  first  prin- 
ciples of  knowledge  are  the  constitutive  logical  principles  of  any 
world.  Just  so  the  intrinsic  ethical  values  are  the  conditions  of 
the  life  of  personality,  and  the  values  of  beauty  and  personal 
emotion  are  the  conditions  of  harmonious  self-expression  and  self- 
fulfillment. 

The  over-self  cannot  be  infinite  in  the  sense  of  being  an  in- 
definite potentiality  of  any  imaginable  kind  of  action,  thought, 
or  feeling.  That  would  be  a  false  infinite.  He  could  not,  for 
instance,  be  a  cosmical  liar  or  be  self-contradictory  in  his  thought 
or  will.  Moreover,  if  he  affirms  the  reality  of  other  selves,  he 
must  respect  that  reality.  He  can  do  no  violence  to  the  ethical 
nature  of  selves.  And  he  can  only  be  a  self  by  finding  his  own 
self-fulfillment  and  self-satisfaction  through  the  growth  of  finite 
selves  in  self-fulfillment.  A  self  who  was  alone  in  the  universe, 
or  who  alone  was  the  universe,  would  be  no  genuine  self.  The 
supreme  self  may  not  be  limited  by  any  externally  imposed  phys- 


494  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

ical  conditions,  but  he  must  be  conditioned  in  his  own  self-deter- 
mining life  by  his  own  concrete  spiritual  nature  or  character,  and 
by  the  character  and  conditions  of  the  finite  selves  who  are  the 
members  of  the  universe  nearest  to  himself  in  nature.  Whether 
the  supreme  self  calls  finite  selves  into  being  in  time,  or  whether 
these  are  eternal  coexistents  with  him,  is  a  question  not  suscep- 
tible of  dogmatic  answer  perhaps.  I  have  already  indicated  that 
I  believe  the  evidence  to  be  in  favor  of  the  view  that  finite  selves 
originate  in  the  world  process.  Whether  any  factor  independent 
of  the  supreme  self  is  operative  in  this  process  is  a  question  to 
be  discussed  in  a  following  chapter. 

The  over-self  must  be  at  once  universal  and  individual.  He 
must  be  the  most  concrete  universal,  and  the  most  universal  indi- 
vidual. He  is  the  supreme  individual,  since  his  creative  thought 
or  world-detennining  volition  issues  in  the  formation  and  susten- 
tation  of  a  cosmos  or  whole  which  has  the  determinate  character 
of  a  coherent  system.  In  other  words,  his  world  is  an  individual 
whole  inclusive  of  many  grades  of  finite  individuality.  He,  as 
the  ultimate  ground  of  this  individual  whole,  must  be  the  perfect 
individual,  the  final  source  of  all  differentiation  and  unification. 
He  must  be  universal,  since  he  is  the  source  of  all  individuation ; 
that  is,  he  determines  the  position,  qualities  and  relations  of  each 
element  in  the  total  system  of  the  real.  The  distinction  and  sepa- 
ration of  the  "that"  from  the  "what,"  the  looseness  of  existence 
from  content,  as  Mr.  Bradley  is  always  saying,  which  obtains  for 
us,  because  given  facts  remain  partly  opaque  and  disjointed,  can- 
not exist  for  him,  since  there  can  be  for  him  no  "brute"  externally 
given  "thats."  He  can  have  no  need  of  our  abstract  general  con- 
cepts or  laws.  These  we  abstract  from  the  similarities  of  particu- 
lars which  in  part  resist  our  efforts  to  comprehend  them  in  their 
systematic  relations.  Thus  our  concepts  or  "universals"  seem  to 
stand  outside  the  particulars  whose  similarities  they  represent. 
We  are  not  able  to  see  how  they  cohere  into  a  complete  system 
or  cosmos,  although  insight  into  the  latter  is  the  ideal  goal  of 
knowledge,  towards  which  we  do  make  measurable  progress.  The 
place  and  character  of  every  particular  in  the  universe  must  be 
translucent  to  the  over-self,  since  it  is  defined  by  his  creative 
thinking. 

The  knowledge  of  his  world  by  the  over-self  must  be  direct  or 
immediate  and  intuitive.    If  he  could  know  me  only  inferentially, 


FINITE  SELVES  AND  OVER-SELF  495 

his  knowledge  would  be  of  a  piece-meal  growing  character,  always 
liable  to  error  and  less  adequate  than  my  own  knowledge  of  things 
and,  more  especially,  of  selves.  For  human  knowledge  is  not,  in 
its  more  adequate  forms,  purely  discursive.  In  knowing  things, 
and  still  more  in  knowing  selves,  the  foundation  of  thought  is 
immediate  experience.  In  perception  the  mind  is  in  immediate 
contact  with  things  and  the  function  of  discursive  reasoning  is  to 
organize,  interpret,  and  illuminate  the  immediate  data  of  experi- 
ence. The  goal  of  thought's  activity  in  the  field  of  perceptual 
experience  is  the  achievement  of  a  higher  immediacy — a  harmoni- 
ous and  articulated  intuition  of  reality.  Reason  sets  the  datum  of 
sense  in  its  context  and  relationships.  In  the  knowledge  of  other 
selves  the  intuitional  factor  plays  a  still  greater  part.  Here  dis- 
cursive thought  has  a  more  subordinate  role,  since  knowledge  of 
persons  is  fundamentally  immediate  or  intuitive.  In  the  enjoy- 
ment of  nature  and  art,  in  friendship  and  love,  the  ratiocinative 
factor  is  more  fully  absorbed  in  the  intuition  which  it  illuminates 
than  in  our  scientific  knowledge.  It  is  in  these  intuitive  and 
affectional  experiences  that  we  most  nearly  apprehend  the  per- 
fect character  of  an  ideal  cognition,  one  which  penetrates  with 
direct  insight  the  entire  system  of  the  finite  and  takes  all  the 
elements  and  relationships  of  the  latter  up  into  an  immediate 
grasp. 

Immanence  and  Transcendence 

We  have  arrived,  by  a  process  of  cumulative  inference,  at  the 
notion  of  a  supreme  spiritual  community,  superpersonal  life,  or 
overself,  the  absolute  reality.  We  have  argued  that  the  physical, 
spatial,  and  temporal  world  involves  a  conservingly  active  ground, 
a  perduring  principle  of  order;  that  the  nature  of  truth  involves 
belief  in  a  supreme  systematic  thinker  or  mind;  and  finally  that 
the  world  of  persons,  considered  as  the  sole  bearers  of  values, 
implies  an  ultimate  good,  which  is  the  ground  for  the  attainment 
and  conservation  of  personality. 

The  final  question  is  this :  Is  the  absolute  ground  of  existence 
and  value  an  impersonal  principle  that  exists  solely  by  virtue  of 
its  immanental  activity  in  nature  and  humanity,  and  is  it  thus 
wholly  exhausted  and  contained  in  its  universe ;  or  is  the  supreme 
principle  really  an  overself  or  spiritual  community  which  tran- 
scends all  finite  selves  and  their  world  ?     If  it  be  said  that  the 


496  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

supreme  community  or  cosmic  self  must  transcend  the  world,  in 
the  sense  of  being  outside  it  in  space  and  before  it  in  time,  I  reply 
that  the  conception  of  a  universe  as  a  world  beginning  in  time  and 
created  by  an  external  first  cause,  which  initiated  its  creative 
activity  at  a  specific  moment  in  time,  is  a  contradiction.  One 
would  have  to  suppose  a  cause,  why  the  first  cause  began  to  act 
at  the  particular  moment  when  creation  began.  Then  the  first 
cause  is  no  longer  a  first  cause,  and  we  are  launched  out  again  on 
the  endless  regress  of  an  infinite  series  of  temporal  events.  If  it 
be  said  that  this  difficulty  can  be  avoided,  by  the  assumption  that 
time  was  created  with  the  world,  I  reply  that  the  statement  that 
time  had  a  beginning  is  self-contradictory,  since  a  beginning 
implies  a  time  before  that  beginning ;  but  a  beginning  in  time  is 
no  beginning  and  therefore  time  can  have  no  absolute  beginning. 
A  beginning  of  beginnings  is  the  beginning  of  nonsense. 

Moreover,  the  conception  of  a  cause  spatially  external  to  that 
which  it  causes  or  creates,  as  something  outside  itself  in  space, 
involves  us  in  all  the  difficulties  with  regard  to  the  passage  of  the 
cause  into  the  effect ;  in  short,  in  all  the  difficulties  which  we  have 
discussed  in  dealing  with  the  notion  of  discrete  entities  in  wholly 
external  relations.  The  notion  that  the  universe  came  into  being 
at  a  point  in  time  by  the  temporal  act  of  an  extra-mundane  cause 
is  thus  untenable.  Creation  must  be  the  endless  expression  of 
God's  eternal  activity  and,  hence,  an  eternal  process.  The  world 
cannot  be  spatially  outside  God,  nor  God  outside  the  world.  But 
it  does  not  follow  that  His  character  is  wholly  exhausted  by  His 
continuous  expression  in  the  world.  In  rich  and  perfect  self- 
completeness  He  must  transcend  the  world  as  it  is  at  any  moment. 
He  cannot  be  less,  and  He  must  be  much  more,  a  self  than  any 
finite  self.  He  must  transcend  in  insight,  in  wealth  of  content 
and  harmony,  and  in  the  ceaseless  self-activity,  of  His  will,  all 
other  selves.  The  difficulties  in  regard  to  transcendence  and  im- 
mance  arise,  it  seems  to  me,  largely  from  taking  these  terms  in  a 
physical  or  material  sense.  When  we  say  that  God  transcends  the 
world,  what  we  properly  mean  is,  not  that  He  is  outside  of  it,  but 
that,  in  the  quality  of  His  character  or  nature,  in  His  wealth  of 
content  and  harmony  of  inner  spiritual  being  and  action,  He 
transcends  in  worth  or  value  all  finite  selves.  He  is  the  absolute 
center  of  values. 

I  admit  the  great   difficulty  in  conceiving  how  a  conscious 


FINITE  SELVES  AND  OVER-SELF  497 

community  of  being  can  be  uniquely  self-conscious,  and  yet  be 
the  unitary  ground  of  a  world  of  particular  things  and  finite  per- 
sons. Still  we  do  have  inklings  of  how  this  may  be  so.  Even  a 
great  representative  human  individual,  such  as  an  Abraham 
Lincoln,  may,  with  all  his  unique  and  private  selfhood,  be  in  a 
genuine  sense  the  source  and  unifier  of  a  nation's  will.  A  Jesus 
may  be  solitary  and  transcendent  in  his  inner  life  amidst  the 
crowd  and  even  amongst  his  beloved  disciples,  and  yet  be  the 
unifying  will  of  their  wills,  spirit  of  their  spirits.  And  the  human 
spiritual  hero  fulfills  this  function  just  in  proportion  to  the 
measure  in  which  he  incarnates  the  universal  cosmical  will.  Of 
course  there  is  a  fundamental  difference  between  any  finite  indi- 
vidual, as  dependent  on  the  supreme  will,  and  that  will.  But  the 
difference  must  be  one  of  degree.  Finite  selves  must  be  the  in- 
finitely varied  manifestations  in  time  of  the  universal  self.  There 
must  be  identity  of  spirit  amidst  all  the  varied  forms  and  degrees 
of  its  manifestations.  The  overself  must  indeed  be  self  of  our- 
selves. Spirit  is  enriched,  not  impoverished,  by  self-impartation. 
It  lives  and  grows  by  giving  and  spending. 

I  do  not  say,  then,  that  the  belief  in  the  transcendency  or  over- 
selfhood  of  the  cosmical  community  has  the  intellectual  cogency 
that  I  attach  to  the  belief  in  a  dynamic  and  rational  principle  of 
unity.  I  say  only  that,  if  the  intrinsic  values  of  persons  are  really 
values,  persons  are  the  most  significantly  worthful  realities  in  the 
world.  If  there  be  no  personal  or  superpersonal  ground  for  their 
lives,  the  meaning  and  goal  of  nature's  evolution  and  humanity's 
ceaseless  travail  seems  to  turn  to  nothingness.  Therefore  faith  in 
the  spiritual  character  or  selfhood  of  the  supreme  unity  is  involved 
in  the  recognition  that  personal  values  are  the  finest  fruits  of 
the  process  of  reality.  Such  faith  is  rational,  since  without  it  the 
whole  process  of  reality,  with  all  its  striving  and  suffering,  all  its 
passion  and  vision,  all  its  achievements  and  heroisms,  turns  to 
dust  and  ashes. 

Perhaps  the  greatest  obstacle  in  the  way  of  conceiving  the 
union  of  transcendence  and  immanence  in  the  Godhead  is  the 
spatial  imagery  which  clutters  our  thought — immanent  is  taken  to 
be  "residing  spatially  inside" ;  transcendent  to  be  "living  spatially 
above  or  outside  of."  I  do  not  say  that  we  can  expect  to  free  our- 
selves completely  from  these  associations,  nor  that  we  should  ignore 
the  question  of  God's  relation  to  the  space-order.     If  "the  earth 


498  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

is  the  Lord's  and  the  fullness  thereof,"  if  "the  heavens  are  his 
dwelling  place/'  then  space  is  neither  a  limitation  of  His  spirit 
nor  a  distortion  of  His  glory.  But  I  suggest  that,  if  spirit  be 
trans-spatial  and  capable  of  direct  communion  with  other  spirit, 
the  problem  becomes  somewhat  less  insoluble.  May  we  not  say 
that  in  the  whole  physical  order  God  is  immanent  in  the  sense  that 
the  whole  continuing  system  of  physical  and  vital  energies  consti- 
tute the  continuous  expression  of  His  creative  energizing  will, 
but  is  not  identical  with  his  will;  whereas  he  is  "closer  to  us 
than  breathing  and  nearer  than  hands  and  feet"  because,  while 
we  are  distinct  spiritual  existents,  we  are  spiritually  of  the  same 
nature  with  Him  ?  As  persons  we  are  existentially  distmct  mid 
inferior,  out  essentially  identical  with  the  Divine.  We  can  com- 
mune with  Him  as  with  our  fellowmen,  by  virtue  of  community 
of  nature ;  in  fact  in  spiritual  communion  with  our  fellows  we  do 
essentially  commune  with  Him. 

The  permanent  value  of  the  doctrine  of  the  Trinity  seems 
to  me  to  lie  in  its  attempt  to  express  the  fact  that  God  is  a  perfect 
spiritual  community,  a  superpersonality.  God  the  Father  is  the 
eternal  creative  ground  of  all  reality :  God  the  Son  is  the  eternal 
self-impartation  or  self-manifestation  of  the  eternal  ground  in  the 
eternally  creative  world-process:  God  the  Holy  Spirit  is  the 
eternal  process  of  union  or  communion,  by  which  the  eternal 
ground  is  felt  and  recognized  to  be  forever  energizing  in  the  world- 
process  and,  especially,  in  the  historic  life  of  humanity ;  by  which, 
in  brief,  the  Son  in  His  fullest  being  as  the  Divine  in  humanity 
is  felt  to  be  in  union  with  the  Father  of  all.  Thus,  through  the 
doctrine  that  God  is  a  spiritual  community,  higher  than  and  yet 
verily  or  in  essence  present  in  the  human  world,  justice  is  done  to 
the  social  nature  of  spirit  and  to  the  doctrines  of  immanence  and 
transcendence,  which  otherwise  are  incompatibles.  Only  a  spirit 
or  personality,  at  its  highest,  can  be  at  once  immanent  and  tran- 
scendent ;  can  at  once  live  and  know  and  love  in  and  through  other 
spirits  and,  at  the  same  time,  by  virtue  of  the  fact  that  it  is  a 
spiritual  center  or  unity,  can  transcend  the  other  lives  in  and 
through  which  it  lives  and  knows  and  loves.  Through  the  inter- 
play of  personal  spirits,  living,  moving  and  having  their  being  in 
one  another's  being  and  thus,  through  that  deepening  communal 
life,  attaining  their  own  fullness  of  being,  are  we  furnished  with 
an  adequate  clew  to  the  tangled  facts  of  experience.     Only  thus 


FINITE  SELVES  AND  OVER-SELF  499 

do  we  get  hints  as  to  how  this  seemingly  disordered  world  of  ours 
may  be  the  expression  of  an  eternally  perfect  order  of  existence 
which  is,  at  the  same  time,  the  eternal  order  of  personal  value. 
Through  the  discovery  of,  the  contemplation  of,  and  the  com- 
munion with  this  order  alone,  is  the  fretful  stir  unprofitable  and 
the  fever  of  this  jarring  world  laid  at  rest.  Thus  do  our  noisy 
years  become  moments  in  the  being  of  the  eternal  silence,  where 
alone  there  is  j)eace  and  joy  and  power  for  the  human  spirit  to 
live  out  its  length  of  days  in  the  light  of  the  eternal. 

I  have  hitherto  employed  the  terms — "overself,"  "supreme 
spirit,"  and  "supreme  spiritual  community" — to  designate  the 
supreme  reality.  I  have  done  so  advisedly.  Whether  one  shall  call 
the  supreme  being  a  personality  or  an  individual  will  depend  on 
one's  conception  of  these  terms.  Those  who,  like  Dr.  Bosanquet, 
regard  a  person  as  a  finite  self  existing  only  in  social  relations,  call 
their  absolute  the  one  perfect  individual,  since  it  is  the  all-inclusive 
and  utterly  harmonious  being.  This  seems  to  me  an  unaccustomed 
restriction  of  the  term  individual.  A  finite  self,  and  even  an  animal 
organism,  possesses  individuality.  To  me  a  person  is  a  rational 
and  social  individual,  and  the  supreme  person  is  the  perfectly 
rational  and  social  individual  or  self-conscious  being.  The  su- 
preme being  is  the  spiritual  ground  of  finite  personality,  which  is 
social,  and  hence  is  the  perfect  personality  because  the  perfect 
community  and  vice  versa.  I  regard  personality  in  man  as  always 
imperfect  and  subject  to  development ;  and  the  supreme  person  as 
the  ground  of  the  development  of  man  as  a  rational  and  social  and 
spiritual  individual  towards  fuller  personality.  Therefore  I 
would  suggest  that  God  is  the  perfect  personality,  because  He  is 
the  perfect  community.  His  inmost  character  or  nature  must  be 
expressed  most  adequately  in  originating  and  sustaining  the  life 
of  the  community  of  finite  selves  in  and  for  whom  alone  values 
exist.     He  must  be  self-imparting  love. 

But  the  supreme  spirit  cannot  be  the  impersonal  or  unconscious 
spirit  of  even  a  perfect  community.  Imperfect  communities  have 
no  effective  existence  and  no  live  values,  except  in  so  far  as  the 
prevailing  spirit  of  the  community  finds  adequate  realization  in 
the  actual  consciousness  of  living  members  thereof.  The  imper- 
sonal spirit  of  the  community  is  an  abstraction.  To  set  up  such  a 
ghostly  entity  as  the  supreme  principle  of  unity  and  value  would 
mean  that  there  is  no  real  unity  and  no  real  ground  of  values.    It 


500  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

would  be  to  ground  the  only  worthful  life  in  the  world  on  a  non- 
entity. The  supreme  reality,  if  it  be  at  once  the  ground  of  the 
order  of  values  and  of  all  other  orders,  must  be  a  self-conscious 
spirit.  It  must  be  the  concrete  source  and  goal  of  the  lives  of  all 
other  spirits,  the  perfect  self  which  ever  energizes  and  manifests 
itself  in  the  world,  but  ever  transcends  in  the  harmonious  unity 
of  its  interior  life  its  finite  manifestations. 

Such  a  conception  of  a  concrete  spiritual  life  at  once  immanent 
in  the  world  and  transcending,  in  the  heart  of  its  own  being,  the 
world,  is,  I  take  it,  what  the  doctrine  of  the  Trinity  has  aimed  at. 
With  the  relation  of  any  historical  person  to  the  establishment  of 
this  doctrine,  or  with  his  place  in  the  Trinity,  the  philosopher  is 
not  concerned.  Such  questions  belong  to  the  history  and  inter- 
pretation of  religious  experience  and  faith. 

The  metaphysical  doctrine  of  the  Trinity,  although  it  is  basic 
to  the  Catholic  theology  of  Christendom,  is,  of  course,  not  confined 
to  the  latter.  It  is  the  product  of  the  neo-Platonic  development 
of  the  logos  doctrine.  Its  logical  elements,  in  barest  terms,  are  the 
eternal  ground,  the  creative  self -manifestation  of  that  ground  (the 
logos)  and  the  conscious  union  of  the  creative  and  revealing  logos 
or  Son  with  the  eternal  ground  or  Father.  Thus  we  find  in 
Plotinus  a  Trinity  of  supreme  good,  intelligence  or  spirit  and 
world  Soul,  and  it  is  the  central  conception  of  the  metaphysics  of 
Hegel.  A  history  of  the  development  of  the  speculative  doctrine 
of  Trinity  is  much  to  be  desired.1 

*For  a  modern  statement  of  the  Christian  doctrine  see,  John  Caird,  The 
Fundamental  Ideas  of  Christianity;  for  a  brief  history,  see  the  article,  God; 
(Biblical  and  Christian),  in  Hastings'  Encyclopaedia  of  Religion  and  Ethics, 
Vol.  vi.  Also  the  books  of  C.  C.  J.  Webb,  God  and  Personality,  Divine  Per- 
sonality and  Human  Life. 


CHAPTER  XXXVII 

PERFECTION  AND  EVOLUTION1 

The  universe  in  its  totality  is  dynamic  and  alive,  and  probably 
value-realizing.  Its  meanings  are  fulfilled  in  the  effectuation  of 
the  values  that  inhere  in  personality.  We  must  recognize,  of 
course,  that  the  whole  character  of  the  cosmical  System  of  Values 
is  not,  and  cannot  be,  known  to  human  beings,  but  this  limitation 
of  our  insight  does  not  nullify  the  probable  validity  of  the  hypothe- 
sis that  the  movement  towards  personalization  is  the  most  adequate 
description  of  the  world  meaning  that  can  be  framed  by  man. 

The  supreme  spiritual  community  or  over-self  has  been  pre- 
sented as  the  organizing  and  sustaining  ground  of  values.  It  is 
conceived  to  be  the  ultimate  self-determining  Order  of  Life  and 
Spirit,  which  expresses  itself  in  the  personalizing  process  of  the 
empirical  world.  In  "willing"  (the  most  adequate  term  we  have, 
although  inadequate  to  the  nature  of  the  cosmical  spirit)  the  lives 
of  finite  selves,  with  the  whole  complex  of  historical  processes  and 
individual  histories  involved  therein,  the  Over-Self  expresses  his 
own  enduring  creative  meaning. 

Now,  a  world  which  has  a  significant  and  worthful  character 
must  be  a  realm  of  growth  or  evolution.  To  assume  that  reality 
must  be  eternally  perfect,  that  it  can  have  no  seasons  and  bear  no 
fruits,  is  to  assert  that  ultimate  reality  is  void  of  all  positive  rela- 
tion to  the  process  of  empirical  reality  and  to  reduce  the  latter, 
with  all  its  activities  and  values,  to  illusion.  It  is  to  make  of  this 
serious,  zestful  and  worthful  drama  of  selfhood  and  community- 
life,  an  empty  dream. 

It  follows  that  the  supreme  self  cannot  be  a  timeless  experi- 
ence, an  eternal  and  motionless  "now,"  for  which  all  change  and 
evolution  are  unreal  phantoms  created  by  the  finite  mind.  I  can 
find  neither  meaning  nor  worth  in  the  conception  of  an  absolute 

1  This  chapter  is  the  revised  form  of  an  article,  ' '  Time,  Change  and  Time- 
transcendence  ' '  in  The  Journal  of  Philosophy,  Psychology  and  Scientific 
Methods,  Vol.  v,  No.  21,  October  8,  1908,  pp.  561-570. 

501 


502  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

timeless  experience,  in  which  all  temporal  and  relative  experiences 
and  deeds  are  absorbed  into  a  motionless  eternal  "Now,"  a  "Nunc 
Stems."  Such  an  absolute  would  be  out  of  all  intelligible  relation 
to  our  actual  experiences,  and  without  any  definable  value  for  the 
interpretation  of  our  lives. 

Since  either  our  temporal  world  is  real,  or  actual  experience  is 
wholly  illusion,  we  must  assume  that,  for  the  ultimate  ground  of 
selves   and  values,   there   is   real  succession   and   growth.      The 
supreme  community  of  life  must  experience  change  and  evolution, 
for  it  is  essential  to  the  teleological  and  spiritual  character^  of 
reality  that  individuals  shall  achieve  actual  development.    Reality, 
as  society  of  selves,  cannot  be  a  static  and  absolutely  closed  system. 
Within  the  limits  set  by  the  supreme  principles  of  the  world-order, 
there  must  be  free  movement  of  persons  with  some  degree  of  self- 
determination.     This  need  not  be  a  condition  imposed  from  with- 
out upon  the  universal  spiritual  community,  since  it  is  in  this  very 
world  of  many  differing  and  developing  individuals  that  the  su- 
preme meaning  and  value  wins  expression.     The  supreme  spirit 
may  know,  with  the  single  and  continuous  synthetic  grasp  of  his 
intuitive  insight,  all  the  determinate  possibilities  of  growth  open 
to  finite  selves,  if  he  creatively  wills  their  being,  and  therewith, 
the  conditions  of  their  growth.    He  may  know  the  whole  range  of 
activities  possible  to  all  beings  capable  of  choice.     He  may  know 
the  limits  of  error  and  evil  open  to  every  individual,  since  these 
limits  are  set  by  the  determinate  character  of  his  world  and  of 
each  individual  in  it.     In  short,  he  may  know  that  the  limits  of 
"negation"  in  the  finite  realm  are  those  of  mutual  implication  and 
contrast  in  a  concrete  and  systematic  whole,  not  those  of  bare  con- 
tradiction by  which  things  are  forever  driven  apart. 

I  employ  the  term  "negation"  here  in  the  sense  of  living  and 
concrete  difference  or  contrast  in  an  actual  system  which  coheres 
through  the  positive  qualities  and  mutual  implications  of  its  mem- 
bers, so  that  all  differences  in  the  system  are  real  when  their  mean- 
ings are  developed.  The  world  of  "morality,"  "society,"  or 
"truth"  is  such  a  system.  "Bare"  negation,  on  the  other  hand,  is 
contradiction  which  merely  denies  the  presence  of  some  reality,  for 
example,  "not-good,  not-wise,"  etc.  I  do  not  think  that  bare  nega- 
tion is  ever  intelligible.  All  significant  denial  involves  affirmation. 
Spinoza's  Omnis  determinatio  est  negatio  is  a  half-truth.  The 
other  half  is  Omnis  negatio  est  determinatio. 


PERFECTION  AND  EVOLUTION  503 

Concrete  examples  of  such  individual  systems  of  differences 
are:  a  family,  which  is  and  coheres  through  the  differences  or 
contrasts  of  husband  and  wife,  child  and  parent,  brother  and 
sister ;  a  community  or  state,  the  life  of  which  is  maintained  and 
enriched  by  the  specialization  of  individuality  and  function  of  its 
members;  the  body  of  truth  in  any  well-organized  science,  etc. 
The  ultimate  standard  or  ideal  criterion  of  truth,  morality,  social 
life  in  all  its  forms,  as  of  reality  as  a  whole,  is  that  of  a  system  of 
differences  or  particulars,  constituting  by  their  mutual  implica- 
tions a  universe  of  individuals  which  itself  is  an  individual  whole 
or  community. 

When  Hegel  speaks  of  the  "power  of  the  negative,"  I  take  it 
that  he  means  that  reality  is  a  living  and  individual  system  or 
society  of  cohering  and  mutually  implicatory  individualities.  The 
dynamic  quality  of  negation  or  contrast  depends  on  the  fact  that 
the  evolution  of  reality  is  an  evolution  of  life,  intelligence,  and 
spirit.  The  power  of  the  negative  is  that  of  definition  or  fulfill- 
ment of  individuality  through  differentiation  and  the  synthesis  of 
differences.  If  reality  at  its  highest  level  be  "spiritual,"  only  thus 
can  development  take  place  in  it,  since  all  spiritual  development 
involves  the  interplay  of  contrast  and  organization  in  the  elements 
of  a  totality ;  whether  that  totality  be  an  individual  organism  or 
mind,  a  social  group  or  a  system  of  ideas.  Only  if  reality  were 
static,  and  evolution  an  illusion,  would  the  power  of  negation  be 
meaningless. 

The  supreme  spirit  of  life  can  only  be  the  ordering  principle 
or  organizing  power  of  a  world  in  which  there  takes  place,  with 
every  fresh  achievement  of  selves,  positive  increase  of  value,  and, 
with  every  fundamental  failure,  loss  of  value.  How  then  can  such 
a  Community  or  over-self  be  conceived  as  perfect  ?  Well,  if  "per- 
fection" must  exclude  any  activity  of  such  a  self  or  communal 
spirit  in  a  world  of  imperfect  beings,  and  any  sympathetic  relation 
to  development  therein,  let  us  admit  that  the  supreme  spirit  is  not 
absolute  and  is  imperfect ;  but,  in  this  case,  judged  by  the  highest 
human  standards  of  value,  such  "imperfection"  has  more  worth 
than  a  static  and  lifeless  perfection.  An  absolute  out  of  all  positive 
relation  to  the  world  of  developing  reality  is  neither  a  community 
of  persons  nor  an  over-self.  It  is  simply  a  motionless  mechanism. 
Static  perfection  is  death. 

Progress,  in  and  through  the  deeds  of  a  constant  succession  of 


504  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

individuals  and  generations  in  the  continuing  life  of  humanity,  its 
societies  and  cultures,  must  constitute  real  values  in  the  universe. 
Who  would  deny  that  the  world  was  made  positively  richer  by  the 
development  of  the  classic  culture  of  Athens,  or  of  the  Christian 
religion,  of  Elizabethan  literature,  or  the  art  and  science  of  the 
seventeenth  and  nineteenth  centuries  ?  In  the  process  of  spiritual 
evolution,  as  well  as  in  its  forerunner,  vital  evolution,  there  has 
been  real  growth  and  enrichment.  So  long,  then,  as  the  historical 
process  keeps  up  must  not  the  supreme  community  be  imperfect 
and  subject  to  growth?  Since  it  participates  in  the  historical 
evolution  of  finite  lives  and  in  the  enrichment  of  values  in  these 
lives,  must  not  its  own  life  be  continually  enhanced  thereby  ?  In 
regard  to  this  difficulty  I  suggest  the  following  considerations :  ^ 

1.  Any  sort  of  progress  presupposes  standards  of  estimation. 
Progress  in  personal  or  spiritual  values  presupposes  criteria  of. 
value,  that  are  not  themselves  subject  to  the  change  and  transmuta- 
tion which  they  serve  to  evaluate.  If  the  True  and  the  Good,  in 
the  realm  of  finite  development,  gradually  win  greater  effective- 
ness, or  have  definite  meaning,  however  dimly  apprehended  this 
may  be  by  finite  agents,  there  must  be  ultimate  standards  of  truth 
and  goodness  to  which  these  finite  achievements  approximate  in 
varying  degrees.  The  ultimate  values  may  unceasingly  win  ex- 
pression in  a  variety  of  finite  realms,  but  their  inherent  qualitative 
character  is  not  thereby  altered.  The  progressive  movement  of 
finite  spirits,  in  the  realization  of  intellectual,  moral,  and  emo- 
tional values,  means  that  there  function,  in  every  successive  stage 
and  differing  phase  of  cosmical  evolution  or  individual  develop- 
ment, permanent  intrinsic  values.  Evolution  or  progress  without 
direction,  goal,  or  standard,  is  a  meaningless  contradiction  in 
terms.  A  value  that  is  solely  relative  to  another  value,  and  so  on 
indefinitely,  is  not  a  true  standard  of  value. 

2.  Every  significant  individual  life  or  epoch  of  historical 
culture  must  have  intrinsic  worth  in  itself,  and  thus  be  a  worthful 
element  in  the  dynamic  process  of  reality.  It  cannot  be  a  mere 
link  in  an  endless  chain  of  a  "progress"  that  has  no  "whence" 
and  no  "whither."  Nothing  in  experience  has  any  intrinsic  worth, 
unless  it  bears  within  its  own  bosom  the  power  of  yielding  imme- 
diate values  for  selves.  Hence,  an  endless  succession  of  temporal 
stages,  each  contributory  to  a  possible  future  value  never  fully 
realized,  is  without  meaning  and  value.     Always  the  living  now 


PERFECTION  AND  EVOLUTION  505 

must  be  laden  with  intrinsic  values.  The  latter  cannot  wait  to 
win  perfection  at  some  remote  date,  or  even  a  dateless  perfection. 
It  must  be  ever  winning  perfect  self-expression,  although  the  values 
that  are  in  the  possession  of  any  particular  finite  self  or  culture 
may  seem  imperfect.  The  True,  the  Good,  and  the  Beautiful  may 
seem,  to  any  finite  insight,  imperfect;  but  the  finite  self's  very 
judgment  and  feeling  of  imperfection  involve  the  presence  in  his 
experience  of  the  sense  of  perfect  values,  as  now  and  ever  valid 
and  effective.  He  condemns  his  own  partial  deed  only  by  the  light 
of  the  perfect  deed. 

3.  Progress  in  individual  lives,  and  in  historical  stages,  in  the 
attainment  of  higher  values  or  the  fuller  possession  and  wider  dis- 
tribution of  already  recognized  values,  does  not  necessarily  mean 
that  the  ultimate  self,  or  ideal  community  of  persons,  as  the  sus- 
taining and  effectuating  ground  of  values,  must  change  or  progress 
in  its  own  "character"  or  "will."  The  ultimate  ground  of  values 
may  maintain  itself  continuously,  as  the  enduring  unity,  through- 
out all  the  diversity  of  its  historical  relations.  As  the  dynamic 
community  in  which  all  sundered  and  fragmentary  meanings  of 
empirical  reality  are  knitted  up,  the  over-self  may  fully  conserve 
and  express,  in  the  wealth  of  its  self-manifestation,  all  the  intrinsic 
values  which  in  the  various  phases  of  the  empirical  order,  as  taken 
in  isolation  from  each  other,  seem  impotent  and  unfulfilled.  Each 
element  seen  by  itself  alone  is  not  truly  seen,  and  yet  each  may 
contribute  to  the  perfect  whole. 

The  difficulties  involved  in  thinking  the  relation  of  a  temporal 
world  to  perfection  seem  to  arise  in  part  from  making  the  quanti- 
tative view  of  things  a  final  norm.  An  increase  in  the  number  of 
finite  selves  who  win  and  enjoy  the  highest  values  is  not  an  altera- 
tion of  the  intrinsic  qualitative  character  of  these  values.  Indi- 
viduality does  not  mean  oddity,  and  the  value  of  individuality  does 
not  consist  in  adding  something  that  the  universe  never  had  before. 
The  value  of  personal  individuality  consists  in  its  own  possession 
of,  and  direction  by,  universal  values. 

The  relation  of  a  supreme  spirit  to  change  and  history  will  per- 
haps be  made  clearer  by  some  general  considerations  on  the  nature 
of  time. 

Every  idea  of  time,  from  the  crudest  to  the  most  abstract,  has 
its  roots  in  the  present  experience.  No  past  has  actuality  or  mean- 
ing which  is  not  involved  in  the  living  present.     A  "present"  can 


506  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

not  strictly  be  defined.  It  eludes  the  very  conditions  of  precise 
definition,  since,  as  soon  as  one  takes  the  first  step  towards  appre- 
hending it  in  thought,  it  has  already  become  past.  We  are  all  sure 
of  the  present  in  which  we  live,  as  we  are  sure  of  our  own  identity. 
The  "present"  offers  the  same  obstacles  to  definition  that  the  living 
self  of  our  immediate  experience  offers.  In  fact,  the  immediate 
consciousness  of  the  present  and  the  immediate  sense  of  selfhood 
are  the  same  thing,  viewed  from  different  standpoints.  Ever  flow- 
ing on  or  "becoming,"  the  living  self  is  the  experienced  interpene- 
tration  of  various  qualitatively  different  phases,  of  a  progress  with 
heterogeneous  aspects  and  a  variety  of  stages,  in  which  "past," 
"present,"  and  "future"  are  only  relatively  and  indefinitely  dis- 
tinguishable. 

We  can  conceive  of  other  beings,  possessing  minuter  or  coarser 
time-perceptions  than  ourselves;  as  having,  in  relation  to  an  objec- 
tive standard  of  measurement,  much  longer  or  shorter  ''presents" 
than  we  have,  that  is,  as  living  in  different  "tempos."  2  The  living 
present,  which  we  distinguish  from  past  and  future,  but  which 
actually  has  duration,  and,  hence,  includes  past  and  future  in  its 
own  apparent  instantaneity,  has  been  called  the  "specious"  present. 
It  does  not  contain  any  sharp  delimitation  of  before  and  after.  It 
"becomes,"  but  does  not  begin  or  end,  and  its  duration  is  measured 
by  the  aid  of  retrospection  and  in  spatial  terms.  As  soon  as  I 
undertake  to  determine  the  content  and  extent  of  my  present,  the 
present  to  be  so  determined  has  already  become  past.  The  actual 
present  is  now  the  incipient  purpose  and  plan  of  measuring  the 
fleeing  specious  present. 

The  actually  experienced  present,  then,  need  contain  no  def- 
inite awareness  of  change.  And  yet,  the  present  cannot  be  a 
motionless  point  or  dimensionless  line  transverse  to  the  direction 
of  change ;  for  what  then  becomes  of  past  and  future,  and  how  can 
we  speak,  even  retrospectively,  of  the  present  as  having  concrete 
reality  ?  If  the  present  have  not  breadth,  what  becomes  of  time 
and  change  ?  In  truth,  in  the  actual  present  the  self  transcends 
discrete  change  or  mutually  external  time-lapses,  through  the  act 
of  synthesis  by  which  it  grasps  a  succession  as  one  order.  The 
so-called  timelessness  of  a  self  consists  in  this  power  of  continuous 


*C.f.  J.  Eoyee,  The  World  and  the  Individual,  Vol.  II,  Lecture  iii;  also  O. 
Liebmann,  in  Zur  Analysis  der  Wirklichlceit,  4th  edition. 


PERFECTION  AND   EVOLUTION  507 

durational  synthesis.  When  I  begin  to  recite  a  line  or  stanza  of 
poetry  there  is  actually  present  in  my  consciousness  the  feeling  of 
the  continuous  movement  of  meaning  of  the  line,  or,  perhaps,  of 
the  entire  stanza,  while  I  am  actually  saying  a  single  syllable.  Or 
I  sit  down  to  write  a  discussion  which  I  have  previously  thought 
out,  and,  as  I  proceed,  the  argument  develops  out  of  the  nascent 
synthetic  feeling  that  I  have  of  the  discussion  in  its  entirety.  The 
actual  present,  then,  is  constituted  by  a  progressing  synthetic  unity 
of  self-activity  involving  continuity  of  interest  and  meaning. 

And  the  "past"  is  a  reconstruction  or  revival,  determined  by 
the  synthetic  continuity  of  interest  in  the  living  flow  of  actual 
experience.  A  tiresome  experience,  such  as  listening  to  a  bore, 
which  seemed  endless  while  we  were  undergoing  it,  shrinks  to 
almost  nothing  in  our  recollection.  An  experience,  unified  and 
controlled  by  a  strong  emotional  interest,  may  be  devoid  of  imme- 
diate consciousness  of  succession  and  of  all  explicit  reference  to 
past  and  future,  because  its  successive  features  (successive  for 
retrospective  analysis)  are  fused  together  or  interpenetrate  in  one 
whole  of  emotional  tension,  "Dem  GliicJclichen  schlagt  heine 
Stunde."  In  recollection,  on  the  other  hand,  such  an  experience 
bulks  large  because  of  its  unity  or  vital  interpenetration  with  the 
actual  present. 

The  actual  basis  of  belief  in  the  past's  reality  is  the  living 
"now"  or  "duration"  of  experience.  The  past  is  a  reconstruction 
made  by  a  thinking  self.  The  possibility  of  this  reconstruction 
and,  by  consequence,  the  present  reality  of  the  past  depends  on  the 
filiation  of  interest  and  meaning  in  and  with  the  present  synthetic 
movement  of  a  self.  In  this  time-spanning  synthesis  past  and  pres- 
ent are  united,  and,  without  it,  the  past  would  not  now  be  recog- 
nized as  having  once  been  real.  The  basis  of  all  reconstruction  of 
a  past  period,  for  example,  in  human  history,  in  geology,  or  in  the 
history  of  the  solar  system,  is  always  an  inference  based  on  an 
assumed  analogy  or  continuity  of  mental,  moral,  or  physical 
processes  then  and  now.  We  begin  with  certain  present  data — 
manuscripts,  social  ideas,  or  rock  strata — and  we  interpret  these 
in  terms  of  a  continuity  of  process.  The  Periclean  age,  the 
Archaean  epoch,  the  primitive  star  mist,  are  all  constructed  on  the 
assumption  of  duration  of  process  or  continuity  of  movement — in 
the  affairs  of  men,  the  formation  of  earth  structure,  the  chemical 
and  physical  processes  of  the  solar  system. 


508  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

In  the  same  way  the  future  depends  on  the  present.  The 
future  is  the  present  forward-reaching.  It  is  the  incipient  tension 
of  developing,  and  as  yet  unsatisfied,  interests,  desires,  meanings. 
The  musical  symphony,  the  operatic  phrase,  the  present  aching 
yearning  of  love,  the  present  imperative  stress  of  ambition,  emo- 
tionally demand  their  own  completion.  For  the  failing  old  man  in 
his  dotage  there  is  literally  no  future  on  this  side  of  the  grave. 
For  him  the  past  and  present  intertwine  and  are  all,  unless  the 
urge  of  religious  feeling  quickens  him  to  project  himself  into  a 
life  beyond  the  grave.  For  the  young  man,  on  the  contrary,  life 
is  big  to  infinity  because  of  his  strong  interests  and  desires. 

Our  notion  of  time,  then,  is  the  form  into  which  we  project, 
from  the  living  present,  the  continuity  of  our  interests,  aims  and 
values.  Psychical  time  is  the  shadow  cast  by  the  unsatisfied  will  of 
man  along  the  world  of  cosmic  becoming.  It  is  the  mark  of  the  in- 
complete moving  towards  completion.  And  the  so-called  direction 
of  time's  flow  is  determined  bv  the  tensions  of  human  interest  and 
aim.  Hence,  the  movements  of  history  and  geography  appear  as 
irreversible  series  of  qualitatively  individual  acts  and  never-to-be- 
repeated  events,  in  contrast  with  the  reversible  character  of  a 
purely  mechanical  system.  The  historical  development  of  man- 
kind and  of  the  world,  as  of  an  individual,  constitute  series  of 
qualitatively  discrete  or  unique  occurrences.  The  continuity  of 
any  historical  whole,  for  example,  the  life  of  a  great  man,  the  his- 
tory of  England  or  of  Christianity,  is  dependent  on  a  community 
of  meanings  and  values  which  interpenetrate  the  succession  of 
events  and  constitute  them  a  whole.  Every  real  history  is  con- 
stituted by  a  spiritual  synthesis.  Hence  the  so-called  absolute  con- 
tinuity of  time's  flow  is  a  misleading  metaphor.  In  so  far  as  the 
movement  of  reality  is  discrete,  actual  time  is  discrete  and  hetero- 
geneous. There  are  as  many  perceptual  time-series  as  there  are 
striving  and  developing  selves.  Perceptual  time,  as  the  form  of 
experienced  becoming,  must  be,  so  far,  at  least,  as  imperfect  beings 
are  concerned,  coincident  in  extent  with  change. 

Since  the  concrete  present  alone  is  actual,  and  the  past  and 
future  have  reality  only  as  factors  in  the  living  present,  how  can 
there  be  any  consciousness  of  succession  ?  How  can  the  past  be  in 
the  present  ?  Some  writers  hold  that  there  can  be  no  direct  sense 
of  transition  or  succession  in  experience,  and  that  the  past  is  pres- 
ent only  in  the  sense  that  now  a  part  of  the  past  is  represented  in 


PERFECTION  AND   EVOLUTION  509 

the  present  as  part  of  the  present.    They  hold  that  to  suppose  that 
there  is  transition  is  to  become  involved  in  the  antinomies  of  the 
endless  regress,  since,  if  the  temporal  experience  be  a  continuum, 
it  must  be  infinitely  divisible  and  hence  can  contain  no  actual 
"moments."    And,  if  it  be  not  a  continuum,  then  between  the  past 
instant  and  the  present  there  is  a  "timeless"  gap  which  cannot  be 
bridged  over.     But  it  is  admitted  that  there  are  in  the  present 
vague  pointings  backwards  and  forwards.    Are  not  these  pointings 
just  what  is  meant  by  the  sense  of  durational  transition  ?     I  find 
in  introspection  that  the  past  and  the  future,  as  factors  in  the 
present,  mean  for  me  sometimes  feelings  of  transition.    I  find  also 
that  I  have  experiences  without  feelings  of  transition,  and  in  which 
the  past  is  present  simply  by  way  of  representation  as  my  present 
memory  of  the  past.    But  I  do  not  think  that  a  static  representation 
now  of  a  past  could  really  mean  a  past  for  me,  unless  I  have  been 
conscious  of  transitions  in  my  own  experience.     Both  the  sense  of 
transition  and  the  power  of  representation  of  a  past  experience  are 
factors  in  the  consciousness  of  time.     Temporal  experience  is  not 
a  homogeneous  continuum  like  pure  space,  but  it  does  involve  con- 
tinuity of  meaning  and  purposive  experience.     The  consciousness 
of  continuity  in  a  succession  of  discrete  moments,  on  which  the 
cognition  of  change  and  development  depend,  would  be  impossible 
without  the  continuity  of  the  self  through  change.     The  partial 
identity  of  the  past  with  the  present,  by  which  alone  a  distinction 
and  a  relation  can  be  recognized  in  successive  experiences,  involves 
the  identity  of  the  self  which  knows  change  without  and  within 
itself.     The  permanence  of  a  self  is  involved  in  the  consciousness 
of  time  and  change,  and,  in  turn,  the  recognition  of  time  is  in- 
volved in  the  consciousness  of  the  self  as  continuous  or  self-iden- 
tical through  change.     "Only  the  permanent  changes"  and  "only 
the  changing  is  permanent"  may  seem  paradoxes,  when  set  side 
by  side.    Nevertheless,  these  propositions,  taken  together,  state  the 
fundamental  conditions  of  all  intelligible  experience;  and  their 
roots  are  in  the  self,  which  is  continuous  or  endures  in  change. 
Perceptual  time  is  adjectival.     Our  actual  perceptions  have  a 
temporal  aspect,  but  we  do  not  perceive  time-in-itself  or  physical 
time.     Whatever  reality  time  seems  to  have,  over  and  above  the 
direct  consciousness  of  transition  in  becoming,  is  due  to  its  identi- 
fication with  a  common  measure  of  change.    Time  gets  pictured  as 
the  container,  of  which  change  in  orderly  succession  is  the  content, 


510  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

that  is,  as  a  flowing  matrix  of  change.  In  perceiving  and  placing 
events  in  the  time-order,  the  self  projects  and  sees  in  perspective, 
from  the  "now"  of  immediate  experience,  its  remembered  experi- 
ences of  change,  by  generalizing  the  direction  and  the  rise  and  fall 
in  tension  of  its  own  strivings  and  satisfactions  and  ordering  them 
in  a  quasi-spatial  "form"  or  vessel. 

The  "form,"  "concept,"  or  "notion"  of  measurable  time  is,  like 
that  of  space,  from  which,  indeed,  it  is  taken,  an  empty  homo- 
geneity of  movement.  "Pure"  time  is  figured  as  an  indefinitely 
moving  point  describing  a  continuous  straight  line,  or  as  a  circular 
movement  or  as  an  unceasing  rhythm.3  The  "change"  of  actual 
experience,  on  the  other  hand,  is  the  becoming  or  development  of 
qualitative  differences  in  experiences,  of  a  manifold  variety  of 
tendencies  that  are  organically  related  in  manifold  ways  in  the  syn- 
thesizing movement  of  a  self's  life.  Every  "now"  is  a  discrete 
moment  or  finite  element  in  a  process  of  becoming,  whose  unity 
consists  in  the  synthetic  interpenetration  of  these  discrete  moments. 
We  reflectively  think  our  successive  experiences  as  bound  together 
by  the  persisting  continuity  or  systematic  interrelations  of  our 
interests,  purposes,  and  meanings,  and  the  time  of  these  experi- 
ences is  synoptically  conceived  as  an  abstract  "form"  constituting 
one  continuous  whole. 

In  this  synoptic,  synthetic  activity  the  self  transcends  its 
momentary  existential  states.  Here  it  reaches  beyond  the  contents 
of  its  immediate  experience.  And,  by  reflection  on  this  transcend- 
ence of  the  given  and  the  changing,  through  which  transcendence 
the  changing  gets  ordered  and  dated,  the  self  discovers  that  it  can 
go  on  indefinitely  adding  together  section  after  section  of  formal 
times,  that  it  can  indefinitely  conceive  finite  fleeting  "nows"  as 
strung  together;  it  can,  indefinitely,  proceed  with  the  process  of 
analysis  or  discretion  and  of  synthesis.  So  arises  the  ordinary 
notion  of  "infinite"  time.  This  is  but  an  abstract  image  (com- 
monly visual-motor  in  origin)  of  the  self's  consciousness  of  logical 
infinity.  In  the  case  of  time,  as  of  space,  the  real  infinity  involved 
is  that  of  the  analytic-synthetic  activity  of  thinking.  The  time  of 
actual  experience  is  always  finite.  Infinite  Time  is  the  abstract 
representation  of  the  mind's  power  of  conceptual  analysis  and 
synthesis  of  change-experiences.    By  virtue  of  this  synoptic  func- 


*  Cf.   Chap.  18,  Space  and  Time. 


PERFECTION  AND  EVOLUTION  511 

tion  the  mind  transcends  the  finite  discreteness  of  actual  succes- 
sion and  conceives  abstract  time-series.  The  true  infinite  in  this 
regard  is  a  time-spanning  function  of  the  thinking  self.  So-called 
infinite  time  has  no  independent  reality.  And  actual  finite  time 
is  the  form  of  experiences  of  change. 

We  can  frame  no  positive  notion  of  a  conscious  self  for  which 
change  and  succession  are  unreal.  On  the  other  hand,  the  self 
maintains  a  consciousness  of  its  own  continuous  identity  in  the 
midst  of  change.  The  consciousness  of  identity  is  just  as  integral 
to  experience  as  the  consciousness  of  change.  Moreover,  there  rise 
above  the  surface  of  the  stream  of  personally  experienced  becom- 
ing certain  uniquely  significant,  emotional  and  intellectual  experi- 
ences, in  which  seems  to  inhere  the  quality  of  time-transcending 
worth  or  value.  In  these  the  self  seems  to  find  permanence  in  the 
midst  of  change. 

The  continuous  identity  of  the  self  is  marked  by  striving,  feel- 
ing and  purpose.  The  self  loves  and  aspires,  hopes  and  plans,  etc. ; 
and  is  aware  of  its  own  relative  continuity  of  aim,  in  the  growing 
consciousness  of  its  persisting  interests,  in  the  increasing  harmony 
of  these  interests,  attained  through  the  systematic  organization 
and  fulfillment  of  ends. 

The  more  completely  the  self  is  able  to  harmonize  its  quali- 
tatively various  interests,  and  to  establish  a  persistent  and  develop- 
ing system  of  ends,  the  more  fully  does  it  seem  to  achieve  and 
enter  upon  a  life  of  continuous  activity  and  inward  permanence  in 
"becoming" ;  in  other  words,  upon  a  life  in  which  change  means 
the  growing  enhancement  of  personal  values,  a  life  in  which  the 
past  is  conserved  by  fusion  with  the  present  and  the  present  grows 
by  interpenetration  with  the  past.  Through  this  unity  of  synthesis 
mere  blind  change  is  transcended.  The  permanence  of  the  self  is 
constituted  by  the  persistent  and  growing  organization  of  values. 
And  the  most  abiding  and  self-complete  experiences,  the  emotional 
experiences  and  intellectual  insights  already  referred  to,  are  con- 
stituted by  the  fulfillment  of  purposes,  by  the  realization  of  in- 
trinsic values.  Such  are  the  expression  in  personal  deed,  and  the 
presence  in  personal  insight,  of  universal  principles  of  worth — of 
those  spiritual  values  represented  by  knowledge,  righteousness, 
beauty,  love.  In  these  experiences  the  unity  of  self-consciousness 
is  one  of  concrete  inner  organization,  of  harmonious  synthesis.  It 
is  a  reality  that  at  once  persists  and  progresses.    In  short,  the  life 


512  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

of  the  self  progresses  or  "becomes"  as  a  unity.  Our  so-called  acts 
and  experiences  of  time-transcendence  are,  in  every  sphere,  due  to 
the  continued  synthesis,  by  the  self,  of  a  succession  and  variety  of 
interests,  values,  meanings.  Our  purposes  are  effected  through 
temporal  processes,  that  is,  series  of  means.  And  the  principles 
which  I  have  called  "intrinsic  values"  are  the  generalized  prin- 
ciples of  purposive  synthesis.  The  time-transcending  quality  of 
personal  values  does  not  mean  that  these  values  have  had  no  his- 
torical conditions  in  culture-life  and  the  processes  of  nature.  It 
means  only  that,  to  the  inherent  significance  of  these  values,  the 
causal  conditions  of  their  origin  are  irrelevant.  But  these  values 
can  be  real  and  effective  only  in  so  far  as  they  persist  through 
change,  and,  by  this  effective  persistence  and  cumulative  expres- 
sion, give  a  synthetic  unity  of  meaning  and  direction  to  the  experi- 
ences and  deeds  of  selves. 

Now,  the  analogy  of  our  own  two-sided  experiences  entitles  us 
to  conceive  an  ultimate  spiritual  unity  of  meanings  and  values  as 
transcending  change  through  the  persisting  synthetic  unity  of  the 
principles  by  which  it  controls  and  sustains  a  significant  or  pur- 
posive world-movement.  The  synthetic  continuity  of  the  human 
self,  by  virtue  of  which,  in  its  affirmation  and  fulfillment  of 
intrinsic  personal  values,  it  functions  as  a  persisting  dynamic 
unity;  for  which  the  external  distinctions  of  past,  present  and 
future  are  overcome,  transcends  any  formal  time-order.  If  there 
be  a  systematic  whole  of  world-meanings  (truth,  goodness,  love  and 
beauty)  to  which  our  human  ideals  or  principles  of  intrinsic  valua- 
tion stand  in  some  positive  relation ;  then,  by  analogy,  we  can  con- 
ceive change-transcendence  that  is  not  negative  timelessness. 
These  absolute  values  would  be,  by  hypothesis,  the  ultimate  con- 
ditions for  the  progressive  fruition  of  conscious  life  in  finite  indi- 
viduals. The  only  admissible  form  of  time-transcendence  would 
be  that  of  a  system  of  intrinsic  values,  an  effective  and  controlling 
unity  of  cosmic  meanings,  that  did  not  originate  at  any  definite 
point  in  the  actual  series  of  cosmical  changes  and  that  maintain 
and,  perhaps,  increasingly  manifest,  themselves  through  series  of 
changes. 

Time-transcendence,  then,  would  mean,  not  the  negation  of 
change,  but  the  persistence,  through  change,  of  an  organized  unity 
of  ends  that  preserves  the  effective  continuity  of  its  purposes 
throughout  the  (from  any  finite  point  of  view)  endless  succession 


PERFECTION  AND  EVOLUTION  513 

of  events.  From  this  point  of  view  we  may  at  least  partially 
understand  how  change  may  really  take  place,  and  yet  be  sub- 
ordinated to  a  unity  of  changeless  or  continuously  effective  mean- 
ings or  worths  which  would  so  control  the  universe  of  change.  Our 
own  purposes  are  but  partially  fulfilled,  and,  indeed,  but  partially 
understood  by  us.  Nevertheless,  in  so  far  as  purpose  is  continu- 
ously fulfilled,  the  life  of  mere  change  is  being  transmuted  into 
one  of  enduring  meaning  and  value.  One  may  conceive  a  trans- 
temporal  knower  or  self  as  embracing  many  simultaneous  and 
successive  series  of  changes  in  the  unity  of  his  conscious  activity, 
in  so  far  as  he  grasps  and  maintains  continuously  the  inner  rela- 
tionships which  bind  together  these  parallel  or  successive  serial 
changes;  his  spirit  might  be  permanently  valid  in  the  meanings 
which  he  enabled  to  be  realized  in  a  universe  of  selves,  thus  con- 
stituting their  changing  lives  the  instruments  and  embodiments  of 
permanent  values. 

The  persistence  or  continuity  of  an  organic  whole  of  intrinsic 
principles  of  value,  which  insures  that,  in  the  march  of  actual 
events  and  the  alterations  of  finite  individuals,  spiritual  values  are 
realized,  is  all  that  can  be  meant  by  a  timeless  spirit  or  self,  as 
conserver  of  intrinsic  values.  Such  a  spirit  could  not  be  timeless, 
in  the  sense  of  negating  the  temporal  order ;  nor  unchangeable,  in 
the  sense  of  having  no  positive  relation  to  change.  He  could  tran- 
scend all  time-series  only  in  the  sense  of  comprehending,  in  a  con- 
tinuous organic  unity  or  synthesis  of  relationships,  their  meanings. 
He  could  transcend  change  only  in  the  sense  of  maintaining  a  con- 
tinuous identity  of  aim  throughout  change,  and  in  making  the 
ceaseless  succession  of  cosmical  changes  subservient  to  a  systematic 
totality  of  meanings  and  values.  If  there  be  an  organic  whole  of 
rational  meanings  and  spiritual  values  which  sustains  the  entire 
cosmic  system  of  lives,  and  which,  consequently,  is  the  ground  of 
the  harmony  between  the  values  or  meanings  of  finite  psychical 
centers,  this  ultimate  organization  of  meanings  is  the  cosmic 
spiritual  principle  or  overself. 

In  brief,  the  present  alone  is  immediately  and  primarily  real. 
The  past  has  reality  only  as  a  function  of  the  present.  The  future 
is  real  only  as  the  dynamic  pointing  forward  of  the  present.  But 
the  real  present  is  a  living  and  changing  whole.  It  has  bulk  and 
duration.  It  is  the  active  unity  of  a  whole  of  concrete  and  varied 
elements.     The  presents  of  finite  experients  vary  in  bulk,  com- 


514  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

plexity  and  duration.  All  finite  presents  must  be  conditioned 
elements  in  the  cosmical  present,  the  unity  of  the  living  synthetic 
"now"  of  the  supreme  experient.  The  ultimate  present  may  be 
the  concrete  self-contained  whole  of  self-activity,  on  which  all  finite 
and  partial  presents  depend.  It  may  be  the  continuous  synthetic 
process,  the  completely  interpenetrating  unity  in  which  the  past 
of  the  universe  lives  as  a  function  of  the  present,  and  which,  by 
virtue  of  its  continuous  activity,  becomes  the  future.  The  supreme 
self's  experience  would  thus  be  the  immanent  unity  of  the  world- 
present.  Change  would  take  place  in  the  supreme  self's  world,  and 
the  unity  of  direction  and  meaning  in  change  would  presuppose  the 
synthetic  or  synoptic  activity  of  his  individuating  thought.  His 
centralizing  or  unifying  experience  would  be  the  unifying  prin- 
ciple of  all  times  and  seasons.  Cosmical  time  would  be  a  function 
of  his  self-active  experience. 

In  place  of  a  dimensionless  "eternal"  now,  the  bare  negation 
of  all  process,  I  would  put  the  conception  of  the  concrete,  indi- 
viduated, time-spanning  now,  which  has  self-movement,  duration, 
and  volume.  As  the  synthetic  and  continuous  whole,  which  grasps 
all  finite  changes  in  the  oneness  of  his  own  individual  and  active 
intuition,  the  supreme  spirit  would  thus  transcend  time,  but  he 
would  not  be  timeless.  He  is  conceived  as  not  in  time,  as  though 
time  were  an  independent  entity  in  which  his  activity  begins, 
changes  or  ends.  Time  is  in  him,  since  it  is  the  form  of  his  con- 
tinuous self-activity.  His  "now"  transcends  our  "nows"  but  in  it, 
too,  there  is  variety,  breadth,  depth,  and  complexity  of  texture  and 
internal  self-development.  The  "presents"  of  all  finite  selves 
depend  upon  the  unity  of  the  supreme  self's  present.  All  succes- 
sion and  change  are  either  internal  to  or  dependent  upon  the  unity 
of  his  will  and  insight.  Actual  time  is  a  function  of  experience. 
Ultimately  change  and  succession  must  be  functions  of  the  supreme 
self's  activity.  They  cannot  be  forces  or  entities  which  exist  inde- 
pendent of  or  outside  of  his  self-directing  life.  The  changes  which 
take  place  in  finite  selves,  and  the  changes  in  the  physical  order, 
are  not  independent  of  him,  since,  in  sustaining  this  order  of  a 
community  of  persons  and  its  values,  he  wills  all  the  possibilities 
of  change  in  this  order.  Change  and  development  then  must  be 
positively  included  in  his  life.  He  does  not  change  in  the  sense  of 
being  impelled  from  without  by  utterly  alien  forces,  but  change 
and  evolution  must  be  constituent  elements  in  his  all-inclusive 


PERFECTION   AND   EVOLUTION  515 

experience.  There  must  be  succession  in  him.  His  present  must 
be  a  concrete  totality  which  is  the  ground  of  all  finite  presents ;  an 
internally  coherent  organization  which  comprehends,  in  a  vast  span 
of  attentive  or  active  experience,  not  only  all  partial  presents,  but 
as  well  all  of  the  past  that  is  efficiently  actual  in  the  present.  For, 
I  repeat,  there  is  no  reality  in  past  or  future  except  in  the  actuality, 
that  is,  the  activity  and  meaning,  of  factors  in  the  concrete  living 
and  developing  present.  Since  our  presents  are,  not  static  lines 
without  breadth,  but  dynamic  and  complex  spans  of  experience,  so 
God's  present  cannot  be  a  static  and  dimensionless  "timeless" 
instant. 

If  it  be  said  that  to  admit  change  into  the  heart  of  ultimate 
reality  is  self-contradictory,  I  reply  that  the  whole  force  of  this 
criticism  comes  from  assuming,  to  begin  with,  that  absoluteness 
and  perfection  mean  changelessness  and  timelessness.  I  am  unable 
to  think  a  changeless  universe  except  as  a  dead  universe.  I  am 
unable  to  think  the  ultimate  source,  and  ground,  of  a  living  uni- 
verse as  not  including  change.  There  is  no  contradiction  in  the 
notion  of  a  whole  which  includes  real  and  significant  change. 
Such  a  whole  must  be  an  organized  and  dynamic  totality.  And 
the  principle  of  unity  of  the  whole  must  apprehend  change,  must 
itself  participate  in  change. 

It  has  frequently  been  argued  that,  inasmuch  as  the  finite  self 
rises  above  the  immediate  present  in  its  consciousness  of  past  and 
future,  in  thus  being  able  to  survey  the  course  of  temporal  succes- 
sion, it  transcends  time.  But  this  time-transcendence  is  purely 
formal  or  logical.  It  fails  to  deliver  the  self  from  existence  in  time 
and  change.  The  self,  which  is  thus  conscious  of  "before"  and 
"after,"  thinks  such  moments  as  involved  in  the  incompleteness, 
raggedness,  and  transitional  character,  of  its  present  duration. 
It  has,  as  I  have  already  said,  the  power  of  continuously  synthe- 
sizing successive  moments,  but  this  synthesis  always  grows  out  of  a 
concrete  present  which  has  finite  duration.  Such  formal  timeless- 
ness means  only  that  the  self  is  a  conscious  unity  which  endures 
through  some  changes.  Time  is,  for  the  individual  self,  a  function 
of  experience.  The  self  both  changes  and  knows  change  through 
its  own  mental  duration.  Time  is  a  function  of  selves,  but  of 
things  that  are  not  selves  as  well. 

Various  attempts  are  found  in  the  history  of  speculative 
thought,  to  conceive  eternity  as  a  timeless  instant,  an  eternal  "now" 


516  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 


or 


Nunc  Stans,  or  as  a  single  instantaneous  totality  of  insight 
(Totum  Simul),  in  which  all  past,  present  and  future  events  of  the 
finite  are  eternally  seen  together.4  All  such  attempts  are  merely 
essays  at  defining  the  inconceivable  by  purely  negative  and  empty 
concepts.  An  eternal  now,  a  timeless  instant,  are  simply  not  nows 
or  instants  that  we  human  beings  can  give  any  content  to  at  all. 
Mr.  Koyce  attempts  to  give  concrete  meaning  to  the  totum  simul 
by  argument  from  the  analogy  of  a  composer  or  player  who  grasps 
in  an  instant  the  totality  of  a  symphony  or  a  reciter  of  poetry 
to  whom  the  whole  poem  is  in  mind  in  a  single  instant.  But  the 
composer,  player,  or  reciter  does  not  grasp  the  symphony  or  poem 
as  a  completely  played  symphony  or  recited  poem  at  any  instant. 
It  takes  time  or  succession  for  the  event  wholly  to  eventuate.  As 
he  proceeds  with  his  composition  or  recital  he  is  simply  conscious 
of  the  continuity  of  the  meaning  and  phrasing  in  a  succession  of 
concrete  nows. 

It  is  only  in  the  persistence  and  progress  of  persons  and  in  the 
perduration  of  their  values  that  we  find  a  genuine  clew  to  an  ulti- 
mate principle  of  permanence  in  change.5 

The  one  eternal  order  has  a  temporal  quality,  but  it  is  not  in 
time.  Time  is  not  a  whole  which  contains  it,  for  time  does  not 
exist  as  such ;  it  is  an  adjectival  aspect  of  the  ever-energizing  self- 
active  ground  of  the  order  of  selves  and  values.  Eternity  belongs 
to  the  unvarying  self-activity  of  the  supreme  spirit.  All  life,  from 
the  lowest  to  the  highest,  from  sense  to  spirit,  is  rhythmical.  In 
nutrition,  respiration,  pulsation,  reproduction,  thought,  feeling,  in 
the  whole  individual's  history  and  in  the  history  of  humanity,  life 
moves  in  rhythms.  May  we  not  suppose  that  the  very  essence  of 
time  is  rhythmical  order  and  that  cosmical  time  is  the  eternal 
rhythm  of  the  supreme  spirit  and  life  ? 

4  The  latest,  most  interesting  and  ingenious  of  these  is  Koyce 's  in  The 
World  and  the  Individual,  Volume  II,  Lecture  iii,  "The  Temporal  and  the 
Eternal. ' ' 

6  James  Ward,  in  his  Realm  of  Ends,  calls  this  Axiological  Eternity.  I 
prefer  to  call  it  Axiological  Permanence  or  Perduration. 


CHAPTER  XXXVIII 

OPTIMISM   AND   PESSIMISM THE   PROBLEM   OF   EVIL 

How  can  the  hypothesis  of  a  supreme  spirit  of  good  be  squared 
with  all  the  brutal  accidents,  insensate  stupidities,  fiendish  cruel- 
ties, unmerited  sufferings,  and  insolently  triumphant  evil  in  the 
world?  If  we  conceive  the  cosmic  ground  to  be  a  superpersonal 
spiritual  community,  must  we  not  admit  that  it  is  hindered  and 
thwarted  in  the  promotion  and  maintenance  of  good  by  a  cosmic 
principle  of  disorder  or  evil.  We  seem  to  be  confronted  here  with 
a  dilemma — either  the  supreme  spiritual  order  is  limited  in  power 
and  scope  or  it  is  not  good  in  the  highest  human  sense,  since  it 
tolerates  evils  which  the  best  human  wills  would  abolish,  if  they 
could. 

I.     Natural  Evil 

In  discussing  our  problem  it  is  necessary  to  distinguish  between 
natural  evils,  such  as  bodily  pain,  disease,  death,  and  natural 
catastrophes,  and  moral  evils  which  are  assumed  to  be  the  outcome 
of  man's  deliberate  volitions.  In  the  final  analysis,  all  moral 
evils  will  perhaps  turn  out  to  be  the  results  of  human  ignorance, 
folly,  and  weakness,  by  which  men  are  led  into  greater  evils  that 
they  know  not  of,  because  of  their  efforts  to  avoid  bearing  the 
evils  that  they  know  of.  But  it  will  conduce  to  clearness  to  dis- 
cuss first  the  nature  and  uses  of  natural  evils  without  specific 
reference  to  moral  evils. 

The  most  obvious  forms  of  natural  evil  are  pain,  disease,  de- 
formity, or  physical  and  mental  defects  due  to  the  operation  of 
natural  causes.  By  natural  evil,  as  due  to  the  operation  of  natural 
nonvoluntary  causes,  I  mean  those  which,  so  far  as  we  know,  could 
not  be  avoided  by  human  foresight  and  good  will;  for  example, 
if  two  parents  have  led  clean  lives  and  prepared  themselves  as 
fully  as  possible  for  parenthood  and  yet  produce  a  child  which 
is  physically  or  mentally  defective,  that  is  a  case  of  natural  evil. 

517 


518  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

The  individual  who  inherits  grave  defects,  or  who  suffers  from 
the  incidence  of  uncontrollable  physical  causes  is  the  subject  of 
natural  evil. 

The  indictment  of  the  order  of  nature  for  its  cruelties  or  its 
blind  stupidies,  as  the  case  may  be,  has  never  been  drawn  in 
stronger  terms  than  by  John  Stuart  Mill.1  Since  Mill's  day  the 
spread  of  the  evolutionary  conception  of  the  living  world  as  the 
theater  of  the  unceasing  struggle  for  existence,  the  scene  of  endless 
and  bitter  warfare  among  sentient  beings,  and  of  the  ceaseless 
warfare  between  sentient  beings  on  the  one  hand  and  the  blind 
course  of  insentient  nature,  has  deepened  and  extended  our  sense 
of  the  suffering  and  tragedy  in  the  world  of  life.  This  sense  of 
the  magnitude  of  suffering  has  been  enhanced  by  the  daily  advices 
we  get  of  diseases  and  catastrophes  in  the  human  world. 

The  pessimist  argues  that  there  is  more  pain  than  pleasure, 
more  disease  than  health,  more  deformity  than  normality,  in 
human  life  and  in  the  order  of  nature  taken  as  a  whole.  There- 
fore, he  argues,  on  the  whole,  the  world  order  is  bad ;  or  at  best, 
it  is  not  nearly  so  good  as,  he  can  conceive,  it  might  have  been. 
It  were  better  not  to  have  been  born  at  all.  Schopenhauer,  the 
most  brilliant  modern  exponent  of  this  form  of  pessimism,  which 
is  the  basis  of  the  religion  of  Gotama  Buddha,  argues  that  will 
is  the  essence  of  individuality ;  and  endless,  or  never-to-be-satisfied, 
striving  is  the  essence  of  will.  Hence,  by  its  very  nature,  will  is 
forever  doomed  to  defeat,  and  individuality  foredoomed  through 
all  eternity  to  misery.  The  only  way  of  escaping  from  the  endless 
miseries  is  the  extinction  of  individuality,  by  the  cessation  of 
desire.  Schopenhauer  says:  "All  living  is  striving,  all  striving  is 
suffering,  therefore  all  living  is  suffering." 

The  upshot  of  this  form  of  pessimism  is  that  life  is  not  worth 
living,  and  that  those  who  persist  in  living  and  procreating  more 
of  their  kind  to  suffer  the  same  miseries  or  perhaps  greater  miser- 
ies than  themselves,  are  fools — are,  in  short,  the  blind  tools  of 
blind  instinct  which  cheats  man  with  a  mirage.  Human  life  is 
the  endless  pursuit  of  will-o'-the-wisps,  or  phantoms.  The  will-to- 
live  is  engaged  in  a  sisyphian  task  to  survive.  It  were  better  that 
the  human  race  had  never  come  into  being.  Since  it  is  in  being 
the  next  best  thing  is  that  it  should  cease  to  be  as  speedily  as 

1  See  the  Three  Essays  on  Religion. 


OPTIMISM  AND  PESSIMISM  519 

possible,  that  human  beings  should  cease  procreating  their  kind. 
Since  the  animals  live  by  blind  instinct,  they  cannot  escape  from 
the  wheel  of  endless  birth  and  rebirth.  But  man,  since  he  has 
the  power  of  reflection,  may  free  himself  from  the  thraldom  of 
the  blind  will-to-live.  Schopenhauer  says  that  the  recognition,  in 
Buddhism  and  Catholic  Christianity,  of  the  superior  virtues  of 
the  celibate  life  is  really  an  indirect  recognition  of  the  principle 
that  the  existence  of  individuals  is  the  root  of  evil. 

This  form  of  pessimism  may  be  called  hedonistic  or  eudcemon- 
istic  pessimism  according  as  it  assumes  that  the  unrealizable  good 
is  the  surplusage  of  pleasure  over  pain  or  of  happiness  over 
misery. 

We  must  distinguish  between  two  ideas  of  psychical  good  or 
value :  ( 1 )  The  idea  that  the  good  consists  in  the  greatest  possible 
surplusage  of  pleasurable  over  painful  feeling,  regardless  of  the 
qualitative  character  or  organic  wholeness  of  personal  feeling. 
This  is  pure  Hedonism.  (2)  The  idea  that  the  good  consists  in 
a  more  or  less  continuous  and  growing  organic  harmony  of  feeling 
or  happiness.  The  latter  I  define  as  the  relatively  permanent 
quality  of  feeling  which  accompanies  the  realization  of  person- 
ality. Happiness  is  the  affective  index  of  personal  good ;  if  there 
be  more  misery  than  happiness  in  the  universe  then  the  good  is 
defeated  in  the  long  run;  if  the  amount  of  happiness  be  increas- 
ing then  the  good  is  winning  out;  if  the  amount  of  happiness  be 
decreasing  steadily  then  the  world  is  going  from  bad  to  worse. 

Whether  there  be  more  pleasure  or  pain  in  the  world  is  insus- 
ceptible of  proof.2  By  the  nature  of  the  case,  it  would  be  im- 
possible, to  sum  up  pains  and  pleasures  and  to  strike  a  balance 
between  them.  With  respect  to  the  animal  world,  we  are  certainly 
not  in  position  to  assume  a  preponderance  of  suffering  over  satis- 
faction. The  minds  of  animals  are  probably  not  laden  with  pain- 
ful memories  or  dread  anticipations.  Enjoyment  of  the  present 
is  much  more  characteristic  of  animals  than  the  fear  of  the  future. 
Their  much  less  highly  organized  nervous  systems  would  seem  to 
indicate  that  they  enjoy  satisfaction  and  suffer  pain  much  less 
intensely  than  human  beings.     With  respect  to  human  life,  it  is 


SE.  von  Hartmann  said  that  this  is  the  best  of  all  possible  worlds  and 
everything  in  it  is  a  necessary  evil.  Eedemption  consists  in  a  return  of  the 
world  to  unconsciousness  (Philosophy  of  the  Unconscious). 


520  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

impossible  to  add  together  the  various  satisfactions  and  dissatis- 
factions of  individual  life  and  to  strike  an  arithmetical  balance 
between  them.  Even  more  impossible  is  it  to  balance  up  the 
diverse  and  multitudinous  satisfactions  and  dissatisfactions  of 
the  human  race.  In  spite  of  the  constant  imminence  of  suffering 
in  human  life  and  its  frequent  incidence,  most  people  do  seem  to 
get  many  solid  satisfactions  from  life.  Granted  that  many  in- 
dividuals may  seem,  to  those  looking  at  their  lives  from  without 
or  even  to  themselves  in  pensive  moments,  not  to  get  much  happi- 
ness from  life,  it  does  not  follow  that  most  people  find  life  worth- 
less. Even  those  who  suffer  much  are  often  not  pessimists;  in 
spite  of  pain  they  may  have  enduring  satisfactions.  It  is  not 
true  that  all  life  is  illusory  striving.  In  the  purest  personal  re- 
lationships, and  in  the  contemplation  of  nature,  of  beauty,  and  of 
truth,  we  do  not  strive.  Still  less  is  it  true  that  all  striving  is 
suffering.  There  is  satisfaction  in  successful  activity,  there  is 
satisfaction  in  goalless  activity,  there  is  enjoyment  of  activity  for 
its  own  sake,  and  there  is  enjoyment  in  the  contemplation  of 
progress,  in  the  realization  of  purposes,  in  the  formation  of  new 
purposes  as  well  as  in  present  attainment. 

If  pleasure  be  not  the  highest  good,  life  would  not  be  worth- 
less even  if  there  be  not  in  it  more  pleasure  than  pain.  But  life 
is  more  evil  than  good,  if  its  enduring  purposes  are  not  satisfied, 
if  its  highest  values  are  not  realized;  if  happiness,  in  our  sense, 
be  not,  on  the  whole,  attainable.  Since  the  highest  measure  of 
value  is  the  realization  of  personality  in  harmony  with  the  uni- 
verse, if  the  order  of  the  universe  be  not  in  harmony  with  the 
realization  of  personality  the  universe  is  not  a  good  order.  I 
cannot  accept,  as  optimistic,  the  position  of  those  idealists  who 
say  that  it  makes  no  difference  what  becomes  of  persons,  or  even 
whether  they  are  happy  while  they  exist ;  provided  that,  in  some 
mysterious  and  inconceivable  fashion  values  are  conserved.  I 
grant  that  they  are  heroic  pessimists  and  I  admire  their  high 
courage,  but  I  think  they  darken  counsel.  If  persons  go  to  wrack 
and  ruin  this  world  is  bad  as  a  whole,  although  there  is  good  in  it. 

It  does  not  seem  possible  to  conceive  a  world  order  in  which 
selves  should  develop  into  personalities  without  admitting  the  real 
possibility,  and  actual  incidence,  of  pain,  struggle,  and  failure. 
The  cravings  of  unsatisfied  desire,  even  the  sufferings  which 
come  from  disease  and  the  blind  indifference  of  the  physical  forces 


OPTIMISM  AND  PESSIMISM  521 

of  nature  to  human  weal,  are  stimuli  through  which  man,  in  grap- 
pling with  his  environment  and  in  some  measure  mastering  it, 
organizes  and  refines  his  own  elemental  impulses  and  thus  develops 
his  personality.  In  order  to  adjust  himself  to  the  external  con- 
ditions of  his  existence,  man  must  reorganize  his  own  inborn 
nature.  In  subduing  external  nature  he  acquires  dominion  over 
himself.  He  enriches  and  harmonizes  the  raw  materials  of  his 
own  selfhood.  Without  hunger,  sex  love,  parental  feeling,  gre- 
gariousness,  acquisitiveness,  self-feeling,  constructiveness,  and  all 
the  other  instincts  which  clamor  within  his  bosom  for  self-satis- 
faction, man  would  neither  subdue  nature  nor  become  a  person- 
ality. His  primal  appetites  lead  him  to  industry,  industry  to 
science  and  leisure,  science  and  leisure  to  greater  industrial  con- 
trol of  nature,  and  to  the  growth  and  satisfaction  of  the  finer  aims 
of  art,  literature,  science,  and  social  life.  His  desires  impel  him 
to  create  the  family  and  the  community,  and  to  recreate  them 
again  and  again  as  the  conditions  change.  His  struggles  against 
disease  and  the  hostile  forces  of  land  and  sea  and  air  develop  his 
powers  of  thought,  action,  and  social  cooperation.  Our  common 
destiny,  even  though  arduous  almost  beyond  endurance,  evokes 
fellowship,  friendship  and  love  stronger  than  death.  Man  is  thus 
able  to  wrest  victory  from  apparent  defeat,  to  subdue  the  powers 
which  seem  to  be  arrayed  against  him.  In  this  struggle  he  grows 
in  spiritual  stature  and  can,  even  in  the  worse  junctures,  conquer 
,by  the  heroism  and  faith  with  which  he  faces  apparent  defeat. 

Thus  desire  and  want,  pain  and  craving,  are  not  necessarily 
evil.  They  are  the  conditions  of  the  emergence  and  energizing 
of  intelligent  purpose.  They  keep  body  and  mind  in  action;  ex- 
perience is  enlarged,  knowledge  is  organized,  purposes  are  ma- 
tured, and  personality  becomes  actual.  The  savage  has  fewer 
wants,  less  pain,  and  duller  joys  than  the  highly  civilized  man. 
Culture  enhances  the  sensitiveness  to  suffering  and  to  joy.  Would 
anyone  exchange  for  the  life  of  a  cultivated  man  that  of  an  Aus- 
tralian bushman? 

But  human  instincts  and  appetites,  human  emotions  and  ca- 
pacities, are  often  found  present  in  the  natural  man  in  such  dis- 
proportionate intensities  that  moral  evil  ensues  and  we  shall  now 
consider  this  aspect  of  the  problem  of  evil. 


522  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

II.    Mokal  Evil 

Moral  evil  is  the  outcome  of  man's  unsocial  sociableness 
(Kant's  phrase).  In  other  words  all  moral  evil  arises  from  the 
social  interactions  of  individuals.  Consider  an  individual  liv- 
ing entirely  by  himself!  He  would  suffer  natural  pains  and  enjoy 
the  natural  pleasures  of  hunger,  satisfaction,  heat,  cold,  and  of 
the  seven  ages  of  his  life ;  but  of  duty,  obligation,  fear  of  punish- 
ment, desire  for  approbation,  guilt  or  sin,  he  would  have  no  con- 
sciousness.3 The  natural  impulses  and  desires  of  man  are  not 
evil  in  effect.  They  all  have  biological  values.  They  are  morally 
indifferent  tendencies  of  the  self,  which  may  be  turned  to  bad  or 
good  account,  according  to  the  special  circumstances  of  each  case. 
The  native  instincts  and  impulses  become  actually  good  and  evil 
only  when  their  expression  in  the  individual  bears  on  his  relations 
to  his  fellows.  Indeed  the  natural  impulses  have  a  positive  moral 
significance,  since  their  expression  is  the  condition  of  the  existence 
of  society  and  of  the  socialized  individual.  Without  the  sex  im- 
pulse and  the  parental  instinct  there  would  be  no  family.  With- 
out gregariousness  there  would  be  no  larger  community.  Without 
positive  self-feeling,  rivalry,  possessiveness,  the  creative  impulse, 
there  would  be  no  social  progress,  and  no  individual  development. 
Even  pugnacity  and  fear  have  social  uses.  Moral  evil  arises 
when  the  satisfaction  of  a  specific  impulse  or  desire,  in  the  given 
social  circumstances,  conflicts  either  with  the  well-being  of  other 
members  of  the  social  group  or  with  the  permanent  good  of  the 
individual  considered  as  a  member  of  the  social  group.  In  other 
words,  moral  evil  arises  when  the  individual  shirks  the  effort  of 
resisting  imperious  impulses,  the  satisfaction  of  which,  in  the  par- 
ticular situation  and  manner,  is  incompatible  with  social  harmony 
and  progress,  or  with  the  organization  of  his  own  selfhood;  or 
when  he  shirks  the  effort  of  acting  in  such  a  way  as  to  promote 
the  harmony  and  progress  of  the  community  or  his  own  higher 
selfhood.  Thus  moral  evil  arises  from  the  clash  of  imperious 
impulses  and  of  the  inertia  of  the  sentient  selfhood,  with  the 
social  and  rational  principles  of  conduct.  In  every  case,  moral 
evil  is  isolating  and  disintegrating;  moral  good  is  harmonizing, 
integrating,  organizing  in  effect.     Of  course,  much  moral  evil  is 

■  Cf.  Eoyce,  The  World  and  the  Individual,  Vol.  II,  Lecture  ix,  "The 
Struggle  with  Evil." 


OPTIMISM  AND  PESSIMISM  523 

due  to  the  blocking  and  twisting,  during  the  plastic  years,  of  the 
individual's  impulses  by  an  evil  social  environment.  We  are 
just  beginning  to  appreciate  how  plastic  the  child  is  and  how  po- 
tent the  environment.  It  is  extremely  difficult  to  draw  the  line 
between  individual  and  social  guilt. 

Thus  I  hold  that  no  man  chooses  a  continuous  or  complete 
whole  of  evil  conduct  with  deliberation  and  insight  into  what  he 
is  doing.  Choice  of  evils  is  confined  to  particulars,  and  evil  is 
chosen  not  as  evil,  but  because  the  individual  does  not  realize  the 
effects  of  the  satisfaction  of  the  particular  impulse  upon  the 
organized  continuity  of  his  own  life  and  of  the  lives  of  other 
members  of  the  community.  Evil  is  self-destructive  or  anarchic 
in  tendency;  consequently,  for  a  self  to  choose  to  be  wholly  and 
completely  evil  would  be  for  it  to  choose  utter  self-destruction. 
This  appears  to  me  a  self-contradiction.  If  the  Miltonic  Satan 
say:  "Evil,  be  thou  my  good,"  he  is  choosing  what,  from  his 
standpoint,  is  not  evil.  The  cult  of  diabolism  which  often  appears 
even  in  a  high  civilization  is  the  product  of  mental  aberration  and 
a  symptom  of  social  disease.  It  may  be  urged,  in  objection  to 
our  theory  of  the  social  origin  and  significance  of  moral  evil,  that 
an  individual  may  do  evil  to  himself  alone;  may,  by  some  series 
of  acts  or  of  failure  to  act,  permanently  injure  his  own  higher 
nature  and  thus  act  evilly,  even  though  his  evil  acts  have  no  social 
consequences.  To  this  objection  I  reply  that  I  cannot  think, 
much  less  understand,  the  higher  selfhood  or  personality  except 
as  involving  membership  in  a  spiritual  community.  It  follows 
that,  to  use  theological  terms,  sin  considered  as  an  offence  against 
good  is  always  an  act  of  disloyalty  to  the  ideal  of  the  perfected 
spiritual  community.4 

On  the  other  hand,  one  may  sin  primarily  against  one's  own 
higher  selfhood,  be  disloyal  to  one's  own  personality.  It  is  pos- 
sible to  exaggerate  the  social  bearings  of  moral  evil  and  to  under- 
estimate its  individual  locus  and  significance.  The  ideal  com- 
munity is  one  of  free  persons;  therefore,  betrayal  of  one's  own 
spiritual  individuality  is  social  treason.  The  two  aspects  are  in- 
separable. Personality  is  social,  but  a  spiritual  society  is  a  com- 
munity of  rationally  free  individuals. 

4  In  this  connection  I  beg  to  refer  to  the  profoundly  true  interpretation 
of  sin  by  Eoyce  in  The  Problem  of  Christianity. 


524  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

The  possibility  of  moral  evil  and  its  consequent  actuality 
is  involved  in  the  very  nature  of  finite  selfhood.  I  cannot  con- 
ceive a  world  which  is  to  be  a  "vale  of  soul  making"  that  does 
not  of  necessity  imply  the  real  possibility  of  moral  evil.  It  is 
an  indispensable  condition  of  the  development  of  free  personality. 
In  this  sense  it  is  an  inevitable  fact  of  the  world  order.  A  world 
of  selves,  developing  into  persons  through  the  organization  of 
their  instinctive  natures,  in  the  light  of  reflective  insight  and 
rational  choice,  is  a  world  in  which  moral  evil  must  of  necessity 
appear.  It  is  then  an  unavoidable  but  mitigable  feature  of  a 
universe  in  which  a  community  of  rational  self-determining  per- 
sons is  realized.  Huxley  somewhere  says  that  he  would  rather 
be  like  a  perfect  clock  and  turn  out  automatically  unerring  results 
in  thought  and  conduct  than  be  an  erring  and  sinning  individual. 
For  my  own  part,  I  am  utterly  unable  to  understand  how  a  uni- 
verse of  perfect  automata  could  be  regarded  as  more  perfect  than 
a  universe  of  self-determining  persons.  Furthermore,  a  universe 
of  perfect  automata  is  a  scientifically  impossible  notion. 

Moral  evil  is  actualized  in  the  social-historical  life  of  civiliza- 
tion. Subhuman  nature  and  pure  savagery,  if  such  there  ever 
was  in  the  history  of  man,  can  know  nothing  of  the  problem  and 
conflict  of  good  and  evil.  The  so-called  opposition  of  the  cosmic 
and  the  moral  orders,  is  an  opposition  engendered  within  the 
social-historical  life  of  human  culture.5  The  evils  which  retard 
and  thwart  the  realization  of  the  good  are  born  of  the  conscious 
conflicts  of  men  with  one  another.  The  historical  process  of  hu- 
manity is  a  world  rife  with  conflict  and  suffering,  with  error 
and  unreason ;  a  world  which  moves  slowly  and  toilsomely  towards 
some  dimly  apprehended,  and  in  part  unknown,  goal. 

III.    Evil  and  the  Idea  of  a  Peefect  Being 

Our  final  and  most  difficult  problem  is  this — assuming  that 
there  is  a  supreme  and  perfect  order,  the  overself  or  spiritual 
community  which  is  the  sustaining  principle  of  all  human  values, 
how  are  we  to  reconcile  this  assumption  with  the  existence  and 
distribution  of  evil  in  our  world  ?  I  have  defined  moral  evil  as 
sin  against  the  ideal  of  the  perfect  person  as  a  member  of  the 

1  Cf.  T.  H.  Huxley,  Romanes  Lecture,  Evolution  and  Ethics. 


OPTIMISM  AND  PESSIMISM  525 

perfect  community,  and  I  have  pointed  out  that  moral  evil  is 
always  a  disintegrating  or  disorganizing  factor  in  the  life  of  the 
individual  and  of  society.  By  consequence,  the  more  organization 
and  harmony  there  is  in  the  lives  of  persons  as  members  of  a 
community,  the  more  do  persons  approximate  to  the  ideal.  But, 
since  we  have  already  argued  that  the  supreme  value  and  ground 
of  all  lesser  values  must  be  the  supreme  existent,  we  must  hold 
that  the  ideal  of  spiritual  perfection  is  not  a  mere  humanly  en- 
gendered ideal,  that  the  ideal  of  the  perfect  personal  community 
is  not  a  mere  product  of  human  social  life,  but  must  rather  be  at 
once  the  ground  and  the  goal  of  individual  and  communal  life, 
and  therefore  must  be  the  most  real  reality.  Our  present  problem, 
then,  is  how  to  reconcile  the  evil  in  the  world  with  the  reality 
of  absolute  perfection. 

One  attempted  solution  of  the  problem,  which  is  hinted  at 
in  the  Timaeus  of  Plato,  further  developed  by  the  Gnostics  and 
which  crops  out  again  in  John  Stuart  Mill,  Huxley,  H.  G.  Wells, 
and  many  others,  is  that  the  power  of  God  to  realize  the  good  is 
hindered  by  some  blind  irrational  matter.  Thus,  there  is  an 
ultimate  or  metaphysical  dualism  between  the  physical  and  the 
moral  orders,  between  matter  and  mind  or  spirit.  God  is  limited 
by  this  blind  force  external  to  his  will  which  hampers  the  realiza- 
tion of  values. 

Since  we  have  already  rejected  metaphysical  dualism,  we  can- 
not accept  this  solution.  ISTo  doubt  the  operation  of  blind  physical 
forces  and  the  clamancy  of  fleshly  impulse  are  the  immediate 
conditions  of  much  natural  and  moral  evil.  But,  on  the  other 
hand,  the  physical  basis  of  human  life,  its  biological  groundwork, 
is  not  immoral.  It  is  the  raw  material  of  the  moral  and  indeed 
of  the  whole  personal  life,  and,  since  moral  goodness  and  evil 
inhere  only  in  persons,  a  dualism  based  on  the  opposition  of  the 
moral  and  the  physical  order  is  no  solution  of  our  problem.  Since 
man  is  a  part  of  nature  in  the  fullest  sense  of  the  word,  his  ethical 
and  other  spiritual  qualities  are  natural  qualities,  offspring  of  the 
whole  cosmic  order.  Indeed,  it  is  inconceivable  that  an  imper- 
sonal cosmos  could  have  split  itself  in  two,  by  giving  birth  to 
beings  who  can  intelligently  oppose,  condemn,  subject,  and  try  to 
explain  the  parent  order  for  having  mysteriously  engendered  in 
them  qualities  or  powers  which  are  superior  to  the  order  from 
which  they  have  sprung.    Since  the  whole  of  reality  is  a  universe, 


526  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

if  God  is  limited  and  thwarted  by  the  universe's  order,  he  too, 
like  man,  must  be  a  by-product  of  a  blind  impersonal  order;  and 
his  perfection,  like  man's  imperfection  and  aspiration,  must  be 
an  inexplicable  and  mocking  delusion.  Either  the  whole  of  reality 
is  more  perfect  than  any  one  of  its  finite  parts  and  the  defects 
of  the  parts  do  not  mar  the  perfection  of  the  whole,  or  man  is 
the  highest  being  in  the  universe  and  is  superior  to  the  blind  and 
stupid  mechanical  order  of  which  he  is  a  miraculous  by-product. 

A  second  form  of  dualism  we  may  call  personalistic,  since  it 
assumes  a  cosmic  personal  power  of  evil,  the  devil,  Satan  or 
Ahrimanes,  who  opposes  the  cosmic  personal  power  of  good,  God 
or  Ahuramazda.  The  earliest  form  of  this  ethical  or  personal- 
istic  dualism  is  found  in  the  ancient  Persian  Religion,  from 
whence  it  passed  into  Judaism  and  Christianity.  In  its  best  forms 
this  doctrine  does  not  hold  to  an  irresoluble  dualism.  The  devil 
is  to  be  conquered,  the  good  is  finally  to  triumph.  But  it  offers 
no  solution  of  the  origin  of  evil,  except  when  it  boldly  admits 
that  the  devil  is  the  creature  of  God,  thus  making  God  responsible 
for  Satan's  doings  and  misdoings.  The  doctrine  has  no  empirical 
evidence  in  its  favor.  If  taken  literally,  it  is  open  to  the  objection 
that  it  cleaves  the  universe  into  two  worlds  and  leaves  us  with 
an  irreconcilable  dualism  on  our  hands.  The  ultimate  unity 
would  be  a  nonmoral  principle  of  fate  transcending  both  God  and 
the  devil  and  their  respective  hosts. 

If  one  does  not  admit  the  probability  either  of  the  existence  of 
a  cosmical  devil,  or  of  the  existence  of  an  ultimate  dualism  be- 
tween the  order  of  physical  nature  and  the  ethical  order,6  how  is 
one  to  account  for  the  apparently  needless  prodigality  with  which 
suffering  is  strewn  on  man's  pathway  by  powers  beyond  his  con- 
trol, and  for  the  flagrant  discrepancy  that  obtains  between  the 
distribution  of  evil  and  the  ethical  merits  and  demerits  of  men? 
Before  entering  upon  a  discussion  of  this  question  I  desire  to 
premise  that  our  human  categories  for  classifying  our  fellows 
on  scales  of  moral  merits  and  demerits  are  at  best  rather  clumsy 
and  wooden,  and  are  always  in  danger  of  being  warped  by  the 
Pharisaism  which  can  see  the  mote  in  the  other  man's  eye  much 
more  easily  than  the  beam  in  one's  own  eye.  Perhaps  the  sun 
shines  on  the  good  and  the  evil  and  the  rain  descends  impartially 

•I  say  advisedly,  "probability." 


OPTIMISM  AND   PESSIMISM  527 

on  the  fields  of  the  just  and  the  unjust,  not  because  the  Lord  of 
sun  and  rain  is  insensible  to  moral  considerations,  but  because, 
from  His  higher  viewpoint,  our  hard  and  fast  clear-cut  classifi- 
cations of  our  fellows  into  sheep  and  goats  look  rather  pedantic 
and  insignificant. 

The  synthetic  purpose  of  the  world-order,  if  it  have  a  pur- 
pose at  all,  must  be  the  development  of  persons  in  inner  individual 
harmony  and  in  interpersonal  harmony.  But  such  a  world-pur- 
pose necessarily  involves  imperfection,  struggle,  suffering  and 
conflict.  There  is  this  feature  common  to  the  rigidly  mechanical 
conception  of  reality  and  to  the  doctrine  that  reality  is  an  eternal 
absolute,  that  in  both  cases  all  purposive  activity  is  illusory.  The 
eternal  absolute,  without  seasons,  history,  or  fruits,  is  just  as 
worthless  to  man,  just  as  indifferent  to  the  concrete  and  passion- 
ate significance  of  human  life,  as  a  blind  mechanical  cosmos. 

Any  purposive  and  living  world  of  individuals  then  necessarily 
involves  some  evil.  Physical  evil,  I  have  argued,  is  largely  due 
to  man's  ignorance  and  imperfect  adjustment  to  his  environment. 
Thus  far  it  is  partially  remediable,  and  the  effort  to  remedy  it 
is  productive  of  a  better  organization  of  personality  and  of  society. 
Most  moral  evils,  possibly  all,  are  due  to  lack  of  a  vital  self-pos- 
sessing insight  on  the  part  of  men  as  to  their  true  interests  and 
goods.  That  the  mechanical  operations  of  the  brute  forces  of 
nature  work  great  evil  to  man  cannot  be  denied.  The  irrational 
and  unjust  distribution  of  physical  catastrophes  and  of  disease 
and  suffering  suggest  that  the  cosmic  will  has  to  struggle  in  the 
face  of  hindrances  which  he  did  not  set  up.  On  the  other  hand, 
since  we  never  know  the  final  issue,  it  may  be  that  the  cosmic 
will  has  set  up  these  hindrances  as  the  indispensable  conditions 
for  the  development  of  finite  selfhood. 

Whether  one  holds  that  the  cosmic  will  is  conditioned  from 
without  by  a  blind  force,  or  that  he  is  self-conditioned,  in  that 
the  development  of  a  world  of  individuals  can  be  willed  by  him 
in  no  other  way,  the  upshot  is  the  same — if  the  purpose  of  the 
world-order  is  the  development  of  a  world  of  individuals  into  full 
personality,  this  pwpose  can  be  accomplished  only  at  the  risks 
of  physical  suffering  and  moral  evil. 

It  is  not  conceivable  that  a  perfect  spirit,  aiming  at  the  best, 
should  have  called  into  being  a  multitude  of  sentient  and  intelli- 
gent beings  who  should  be  subjected  to  so  much  suffering  and 


528  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

failure,  if  he  could  have  done  otherwise.  Either  the  over-self  did 
not  call  into  being  these  selves;  or  he  did  not  establish  all  the 
conditions  under  which  their  lives  must  be  developed  and  enjoyed; 
or,  if  he  is  the  author  of  all  that  is  and  may  be,  there  remains 
for  us  an  inscrutable  mystery  surrounding  the  lives  of  sentient 
and  intelligent  individuality,  and  the  things  that  seem  to  us  to 
thwart  and  even  to  wreck  these  lives  must  really  in  some  fashion, 
unknown  to  us,  further  them. 

In  any  case  the  meaning  of  life  is,  in  part,  expressed  and  real- 
ized through  the  sin,  error,  and  suffering  of  selves  as  well  as 
through  their  goodness,  knowledge,  and  joy.  What  then  becomes 
of  the  moral  and  intellectual  distinctions  of  our  deeds  and  lives  ? 
Do  these  collapse  into  the  indifference  center  of  an  absolute  total- 
ity, in  which  all  distinctions  of  moral  worth  are  merged  and  lost  ? 
No !  Since  the  error  and  sin  of  finite  selves  are  transitional 
factors  in  their  moral  growth,  these  defects  and  failures  must  be 
real  for  the  supreme  experient  or  oversell  The  distinctions  of 
moral  value  are  not  obliterated  in  the  whole  of  reality.  Evil  is 
not  a  mere  empty  defect,  not  mere  absence  of  good.  It  is,  in  char- 
acter, oppositional  to  good;  just  so  error  is  not  the  mere  absence 
of  truth,  nor  ugliness  the  mere  absence  of  beauty;  they  are  op- 
positions. Thus,  our  human  values  involve  contrast  and  opposi- 
tion or  negation.  As  Hegel  would  say  they  exist  in  relation  to 
an  other.  The  whole  spiritual  life  involves  the  dialectic  process, 
the  setting  up  of  and  the  overcoming  of  opposition.  (This  is  what 
Hegel  means  by  the  power  of  the  negative  or  of  contradiction.) 
But  the  good  transcends  the  evil,  by  including  and  transforming 
it,  just  as  the  truth  transcends  error  by  transforming  and  includ- 
ing what  was  wrong  in  the  erroneous  judgment  and  as  in  beauty 
the  same  elements,  which  in  disorder  constitute  ugliness,  are  trans- 
formed into  a  harmonious  individuality.  In  error  a  genuine 
datum  of  knowledge  is  put  in  its  wrong  relations;  the  error  be- 
comes truth  when  the  datum  is  put  in  its  right  relations.  The 
artist  takes  the  same  materials  of  sense  that  in  one  arrangement 
give  rise  to  ugliness  or  discord  and  produces  harmony  and  beauty. 
In  evil  action  an  impulse  or  desire  is  affirmed  in  the  wrong  time 
or  place  or  too  much  or  too  little.  The  good  is  harmony,  propor- 
tion or  order,  in  the  expression  of  impulse,  and  the  satisfaction 
of  desire. 

Thus,  the  reconciliation  of  the  opposition  is  not  achieved  by 


OPTIMISM  AND  PESSIMISM  529 

canceling  the  distinction  between  the  opposites,  but  by  a  conquest 
in  which  the  positive  higher  qualities  overcome  and  absorb  their 
opposite.  In  error  the  individual's  judgment  falls  short  of  re- 
ality ;  it  distorts  the  latter  by  failure  to  grasp  the  systematic  rela- 
tionships of  facts.  In  moral  evil  the  individual  will  assumes  an 
isolated  or  particular  interest  which  conflicts  with  the  rational 
and  social  character  of  the  self  as  an  organic  whole  of  interests, 
an  individual  totality,  by  falling  short  of  its  full  meaning.  The 
principle  of  truth  and  goodness  is  the  same — wholeness  or  har- 
monious individuality.  Evil,  thus,  is  irrational  because  it  is  par- 
ticularistic and  isolating.  It  is  the  defect  in  feeling  and  conduct 
of  some  more  pervasive  and  harmonizing  quality  of  the  universe 
of  selves.  Evil  is  negation,  but  it  is  not  bare  negation.  It  is 
negation  by  the  exclusive  affirmation  of  a  part  against,  or  regard- 
less of,  the  whole  in  which  it  properly  functions.  The  positive 
moral  significance  of  the  part  is  found  in  making  it  into  a  working 
factor  in  the  totality  of  individual  life  and  social  order. 

In  so  far  as  the  individual  lives  in  the  light  of  the  harmonious 
and  total  relationships  of  his  own  desires  and  values,  he  over- 
comes the  positive  defects  which  constitute  evil,  by  becoming  a 
cooperative  member  in  the  community  of  persons  which  is  the 
goal  towards  which  the  whole  creation  moves.  Thus  he  ceases 
to  be  an  isolated  bundle  of  impulsions  and  becomes  an  organ  for 
the  fulfillment  of  the  universal  values. 

We  reject  the  notion  that  the  doctrine  of  a  finite  God  strug- 
gling against  obstacles,  whether  personal  or  impersonal,  to  realize 
the  good  which  he  would,  if  he  could,  achieve  at  one  blow, 
offers  a  satisfactory  solution  of  the  problem  of  evil.  Such  a  God 
is  practically  useless  and  theoretically  a  contradiction.  He  would 
be  a  God  who  is  no  God,  but  only  a  somewhat  bigger  man.  There 
would  only  be  some  difference  in  scale,  and  a  difference  not  de- 
terminable, between  his  weakness  in  the  face  of  the  cosmic  coun- 
ter-currents and  the  weakness  of  man.  If  man  be  helpless  in 
the  face  of  a  hostile  universe  or  an  indifferent  universe,  let  us 
bravely  face  the  music  and  be  done  with  childish  make-beliefs 
about  pragmatical  gods !  If,  on  the  other  hand,  we  have  grounds 
for  the  larger  belief  that  the  supreme  order  is  an  order  of  values, 
why  should  we  boggle  at  admitting,  as  we  must,  that  both  physical 
evil  and  moral  evil  are  contributory  to  the  perfection  of  the 
whole!     Nor  can  we  evade  this  conclusion  by  arguing,  as  some 


530  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

pluralistic  theists  do,  that  God  is  not  responsible  for  evil,  since 
he  endows  man  with  free  will  and  evil  arises  because,  in  the 
mysteriousness  of  his  capricious  freedom,  man  wills  to  do  and  to 
be  evil.  The  problem  is  only  thus  evaded  by  pushing  it  behind 
us,  for,  if  God  creates  man  with  a  mysterious  power  of  indetermi- 
nate and  unmotivated  choice,  surely  He  is  responsible  for  having 
so  created  him.  The  only  sense  in  which  I  can  admit  human 
freedom  is  that  the  self,  to  a  limited  and  varying  degree,  is  a 
real  and  growing  center  of  rational  action.  True  freedom  is  self- 
determination  under  the  guidance  of  rational  ends.  The  indi- 
vidual is  responsible  for  the  use  of  his  reason  and,  thus  far, 
responsible  for  his  character.  Indeed,  he  is  his  character,  which 
is  not  a  physical  quantum,  but  a  developing  capacity.  Since  finite 
selfhood  involves  growth,  self-development  through  deliberation, 
choice  with  error,  man  is  responsible  for  his  deeds  in  so  far  as 
he  is  responsible  for  his  own  growth.  But  for  his  original  na- 
ture with  its  limitations  within  and  without  himself,  he  is  not 
responsible.  God,  then,  must  be  the  ultimate  ground  of  the  real 
possibilities  which,  in  the  definitely  varying  qualities  and  condi- 
tions of  human  persons,  flower  into  good  and  evil  acts.  God  or 
the  cosmic  spiritual  order  is  responsible  for  the  fact  that  evil 
can,  and,  therefore  does  occur.  Evil  is  inevitable  but  not  irre- 
mediable, in  part  at  least. 

Why  a  world  of  conscious  individuals  exists  to  develop  by  con- 
flict, and  to  perfect  themselves  by  way  of  error  and  suffering,  is 
perhaps  a  fruitless  question  for  philosophy,  which  must  take  the 
world  as  it  finds  it.  According  to  Christianity  the  motive  of 
creation  is  self -manifesting ,  self-imparting  love,  which  brings 
forth  finite  spirits  as  its  objects.  In  this  world  the  birth  of  con- 
scious volition  is  the  beginning  of  moral  evil.  Individuals  de- 
velop from  natural  and  nonmoral  beings  into  the  life  of  reason, 
love,  and  ideal  values  generally,  through  social  conflict. 

In  the  birth  of  consciousness  and  reason,  in  the  development 
of  the  social  and  moral  life,  moral  evil  originates  as  the  offspring 
of  the  very  process  of  reflection  which  brings  forth  culture.  His- 
torically, then,  evil  is  the  fruit  of  the  tree  of  knowledge,  and  the 
evolution  of  human  culture  is  fruit  of  the  same  tree.  The  evo- 
lution of  culture,  scientific,  aesthetic,  and  religious,  is  the  ovidence 
that  the  good,  defined  in  terms  of  personal  values,  is  realizing 
itself  through  the  struggles  of  humanity  in  its  historical  process. 


OPTIMISM  AND  PESSIMISM  531 

Through  all  its  blind  confusion,  wasteful  errors,  and  dire  evils, 
human  history  does,  it  seems  to  me,  show  the  working  out  of 
ethical  and  spiritual  values  through  the  instrumentality  of  indi- 
vidual lives  cooperating  in  social  groups.  Does  this  imply  the 
reality  of  growth  in  the  supreme  self  ?  Such  a  conclusion  seems 
unavoidable.  The  supreme  self  cannot  live  in  otiose  and  blessed 
contemplation,  apart  from  the  world  of  finite  struggling  selves. 
It  must  comprehend  and  take  up  into  its  own  life  all  the  passion, 
struggle,  and  pathos  of  man's  history.  It  must  transcend,  and 
yet  work  through,  the  elements  of  "negation"  and  "finitude"  that 
pervade  the  dynamic  and  developing  life  of  the  world  of  historical 
selfhood.  The  supreme  self's  experience  must  grow  with  the  his- 
torical progress  and  personal  development  of  finite  selves.  The 
supreme  good  must  be  a  living  and  growing  harmony  of  differ- 
ences, a  peace  won  and  held  through  opposition,  a  communion  that 
pervades  and  maintains  itself  through  the  developing  lives  of 
many  individuals. 

In  so  far  as  moral  evil  is  actual  it  seems  to  hinder  the  realiza- 
tion of  ethical  values,  and  thus  to  subtract  from  the  fullness  of  the 
good.  So  speculation  has  been  led,  in  the  interest  of  the  vision 
of  the  perfect  whole,  to  argue  that  this  is  the  best  of  all  possible 
worlds.  We  can  conceive  worlds  that,  in  some  respects,  would  be 
better  than  this  one.  Whether,  on  the  whole,  these  conceivable 
worlds  might  be  better  than  our  actual  world  no  man  can  say; 
for  no  man  can  compare  the  actual  world  as  a  whole  with  other 
possible  total  worlds.  Leibniz'  pyramid  of  worlds,  in  his  The- 
odicy, is  a  pretty  fancy;  but  a  logically  vicious  argument  in  that 
every  possible  world  is  just  a  partial  variant,  in  some  particu- 
lars, of  the  actual  world. 

The  only  kind  of  world  we  can  really  think  is  a  world  like 
our  actual  world  in  its  general  features,  with  minor  variations 
introduced  in  some  of  its  details.  All  we  can  say  is  that  suffer- 
ing and  other  forms  of  evil  are  inevitable  in  a  living  and  temporal 
universe.  In  this  sense  evil  in  the  parts  is  necessary  to  the  good- 
ness of  the  whole ;  but  why  the  evil  in  the  parts  should  be  so 
grotesquely  distributed,  and  why  there  should  be  so  much  of  it 
we  do  not  know.  It  is  impossible,  in  terms  of  rational  insight 
alone,  to  harmonize  the  distribution  of  evil  in  the  world  with  the 
idea  that  the  whole  is  perfect,  or  that  there  is  no  hindrance  to 
the  will  of  an  omnipotent  and  benevolent  being. 


532  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

When  absolute  idealists  7  talk  glibly  about  evil  being  "illusory 
appearance"  or  mere  negation  or  absence  of  good  they  are  indulg- 
ing in  vain  babblings,  in  a  word-play  which  is  impertinent  in  the 
face  of  intense  suffering,  genuine  sorrow  or  unmerited  catastrophe. 
They  are  guilty  of  the  same  sort  of  quibbling  as  the  Christian 
Scientists.  To  say  that  evil  is  defect  is  not  to  explain  it  away, 
since  a  defect  may  be  the  cause  of  great  suffering.  Moreover, 
gruesome  disease,  physical  or  mental,  is  not  mere  defect ;  intense 
suffering  and  loneliness  and  despair  are  positive  states. 

When  Pope  sings  "all  partial  evil  universal  good"  he  fails  to 
consider  the  question — "good  to  whom  ?"  If  the  whole  looks  good 
to  the  absolute,  but  bad  to  most  of  the  members  of  his  world,  then 
I  say  that  on  the  whole  the  world  is  bad.  It  is  small  comfort  to 
be  told  that  the  world  is  good  as  a  whole,  if  one  cannot  enjoy  the 
same  outlook  as  the  absolute.  If  finite  selves  can  enjoy  the  good- 
ness of  the  whole  then  it  is  good  just  in  so  far  as  its  members  have 
this  enjoyment. 

The  darkest  mystery  enveloping  the  problem  of  evil  is  the 
unjust  distribution  of  suffering.  The  connection  between  physical 
evil  and  moral  quality  often  appears  capricious,  irrational,  and 
cruel.  The  individual  suffers  for  the  guilt  of  others,  or  for  their 
unavoidable  ignorance;  often  for  his  own  unavoidable  ignorance. 
Careless  or  ignorant  of  individual  desert,  nature  works  out  her 
nemesis  of  compensation  through  the  biological  and  social  solidar- 
ity of  the  race.  The  innocent  suffer  for  the  guilty,  but  to  what  end  ? 
And  nature  often  seems  to  inflict  greater  penalties  for  ignorance 
than  for  enlightened  sinning!  Vicarious  suffering  is  a  common 
fact.  By  virtue  of  the  solidarity  of  the  race,  and  of  some  mysteri- 
ous, though  tardily  effective,  connection  between  moral  evil  and 
physical  suffering,  the  innocent  and  the  wise  must  suffer  vicari- 
ously for  the  guilty  and  the  ignorant.  Careless  of  the  single  life, 
nature  seems  to  care  only  that  in  the  long  run  adjustment  be 
made.  In  this  way  undoubtedly  the  principle  of  the  good  is 
served  through  the  solidarity  of  the  race.  And  the  vicarious 
sufferings  of  the  good  no  doubt,  as  Plato,  the  Hebrew  Deutero- 

7  Mr.  A.  E.  Taylor,  for  example,  in  Elements  of  Metaphysics,  pp.  395  ff. 
This  I  understand  does  not  represent  Mr.  Taylor's  present  view.  Cf.  Brown- 
ing's facile  optimism  in  Abt  Vogler.  This  is  the  optimism  either  of  a  healthy 
and  happy  human  animal  or  of  one  who  cheats  himself  with  words  that  do  not 
correspond  with  facts.  Many  theologians  and  philosophers  have  been  guilty 
of  the  same  procedure. 


OPTIMISM  AND  PESSIMISM  533 

Isaiah,  and  the  New  Testament  writers  have  taught,  are  great 
redemptive  factors  in  the  spiritual  life  of  mankind.  The  highest 
love  is  one  that  redeems  through  suffering.  Nevertheless,  we  do 
not  understand  why  such  an  apparently  unjust  method  of  moral 
development  and  progress  should  be  compatible  with  the  unique 
worth  and  meaning  of  the  individual  life.  By  these  considera- 
tions of  a  universal  connection  of  moral  evil  and  suffering  the 
problem  is  only  pushed  one  point  farther  back.  If  one  refuse  to 
accept  an  ethical-metaphysical  dualism  with  its  unreconciled  op- 
position of  two  warring  powers  of  good  and  evil,  or  a  chaotic 
pluralism  of  powers,  one  must  assume  that  the  relation  of  the 
supreme  spirit  to  the  race  is  not  the  same  as  his  relation  to  the 
individual.  One  must  assume  that  the  spiritual  development  of 
the  individual,  through  striving  and  suffering,  is  a  necessary  con- 
dition for  the  spiritual  elevation  of  other  individuals,  and  for  the 
spiritual  elevation  of  the  race.  But,  surely,  the  individual  soul 
cannot  be  a  mere  means  in  this  spiritual  process !  The  suffering 
of  the  best  must  be  a  step  in  the  spiritual  ascent  of  the  sufferer 
who  thus  reaches  a  higher  perfection,  and,  in  so  doing,  becomes 
an  instrument  in  the  upward  growth  of  his  fellows.  The  vicari- 
ous sufferer  must  be  the  crown  of  the  race's  progress,  and,  hence 
there  must  be  for  him  an  immortal  life  brought  to  full  fruition 
under  other  conditions  than  those  of  earth.  The  most  worthful 
individuality  must  be  conserved.  The  possibility  of  the  conquest 
of  evil  can  become  a  reality  only  if  the  protagonists  in  the  warfare 
for  human  perfection  thus  win  immortality,  and,  in  so  doing, 
become  the  instruments  by  which  their  fellows  may  likewise  win 
it.  If  suffering,  and,  especially  vicarious  suffering,  be  the  means 
of  victory  over  evil,  then  the  victory  is  lost  and  meaningless  unless 
the  spirits  of  the  victors  endure.  The  supremely  good  self  is 
thwarted  and  ofttimes  defeated  in  the  struggle  unless  his  finite 
agents  are  immortal. 

In  short,  while  the  problem  of  evil  cannot  be  satisfactorily 
solved,  and  recourse  must  be  had  to  the  postulates  of  moral  faith, 
the  most  satisfactory  view  is  that  the  process  of  psychical  and 
spiritual  evolution  is  a  movement  that  can  achieve  its  ends  only 
through  suffering  and  moral  evil.  If  one  take  this  view  and,  at 
the  same  time,  hold  an  ethically  monistic  conception  of  ultimate 
reality,  one  must  believe  that  suffering  and  evil  are  factors  in 
the  experience  of  the  supreme  spirit. 


534  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

The  doctrine  of  a  suffering  and  self-sacrificing  God,  of  one 
who  is  eternally  made  perfect  through  his  sympathy  and  fellow- 
ship with  erring  and  sinning  humanity,  is  so  far  from  being  out 
of  harmony  with  an  ethical  conception  of  the  universe,  that  I 
should  rather  maintain  that  it  is  the  only  doctrine  of  God  that 
at  once  squares  with  the  facts  of  experience  and  does  no  violence 
to  the  ethical  consciousness  of  man.  In  no  other  aspect  of  its 
teaching  does  the  Christian  religion  in  its  original  form  show 
itself  truer  to  the  deeper  meanings  of  man's  spiritual  experience 
than  in  its  bold  and  profound  doctrine  of  a  divine  redeeming  love 
that  is  expressed  through  suffering,  a  divine  life  that  is  made 
perfect  through  sacrifice,  that  conquers  and  is  enriched  through 
overcoming  its  negation. 

The  goodness  of  a  supreme  self  then  cannot  be  the  bare  nega- 
tion of  the  evil  that  is  in  the  world.  It  must  be  the  positive  self- 
expressing  goodness  that  holds  its  perfection  through  companying 
and  suffering  with  the  evil,  and  thus  transmuting  the  latter  into 
an  instrument  or  factor  in  a  positive  perfection. 

Our  main  business  is  not  to  save  the  universe,  nor  to  help  a 
limited  deity  in  his  difficulties.  Our  main  business  is  to  save 
ourselves  by  losing  ourselves;  by  finding  our  true  selfhood  in 
subjection  and  loyal  obedience  to  the  order  of  spiritual  values, 
to  the  all-inclusive  and  all-transforming  ideal  of  perfection  which 
is  the  most  real  reality.  The  higher  life,  the  life  of  the  spirit, 
consists  in  the  individual's  making  himself  the  instrument  and 
dwelling-place  of  spiritual  integrity;  "In  Whose  will  is  our 
peace,"  "Whose  service  is  perfect  freedom"  since  it  is  the  ful- 
fillment of  personality  through  possession  of  the  spirit  of  whole- 
ness. Wherever  and  whenever  in  thought,  in  selfless  volition,  or 
in  selfless  affection  and  contemplation,  we  put  our  entire  individ- 
ualities in  the  service  of  objective  social  and  impersonal  interests ; 
m  the  service  of  truth,  justice,  harmony,  order,  and  progress 
towards  perfection,  wherever  and  whenever  we  elect  to  serve  the 
ideal  of  the  perfect  spiritual  community,  we  transcend  evil  in 
transcending  our  lower  selfhood.  It  becomes  a  vanishing,  because 
transformed,  defect.  Its  discordances  pass  away  in  the  harmony 
which  we  behold  and  become. 

We  cannot  so  account  for  the  evil  of  the  world  as  to  explain 
the  beneficence  of  all  forms  and  amounts  of  evil.  We  may  hope 
and  believe 


OPTIMISM  AND  PESSIMISM  535 

.  .  .  that  somehow  good 
Will  be  the  final  goal  of  ill 

***** 

.  .  .  That  good  shall  fall 
At  last — far  off — at  last,  to  all, 
And  every  winter  change  to  spring. 

— Tennyson,  In  Memoriam,  53. 

But  we  cannot  prove  that  it  will  be  so.  The  most  one  can  say  is 
that  it  ought  to  be  so  and  if  the  ruling  principle  of  the  universe 
be  spiritual  it  will  be  so. 

We  have  but  faith :  we  cannot  know ; 

For  knowledge  is  of  things  we  see; 

And  yet  we  trust  it  comes  from  Thee, 
A  beam  in  darkness  let  it  grow. 

>|S  «t-  *r»  ^>  *F 

I  stretch  lame  hands  of  faith,  and  grope, 
And  gather  dust  and  chaff,  and  call 
To  what  I  feel  is  Lord  of  all 

And  faintly  trust  the  larger  hope. 

— In  Memoriam,  54. 

0  Living  will  that  shalt  endure 

When  all  that  seems  shall  suffer  shock, 
Rise  in  the  spiritual  rock, 

Flow  thro'  our  deeds  and  make  them  pure, 

That  we  may  lift  from  out  of  dust 

A  voice  as  unto  him  that  hears 

A  cry  above  the  conquered  years 
To  one  that  with  us  works,  and  trust, 

With  faith  that  comes  of  self-control, 

The  truths  that  never  can  be  proved 

Until  we  close  with  all  we  loved, 
And  all  we  flow  from,  soul  in  soul. 

— In  Memoriam,  130. 


CHAPTER  XXXIX 

METAPHYSICS    AND    RELIGION 

I.  The  Methods  and  Aims  of  Metaphysics  and  Religion 

Metaphysics  and  religion  are  similar  in  motive  and  aim.  They 
both  presuppose  the  recognition  of  the  incompleteness  and  inner 
discrepancy  of  the  realm  of  actual  experience,  of  the  fragmentari- 
ness  and  disharmony  of  the  actual  life.  Xeither  in  the  naive 
interpretations  of  actual  experience  nor  in  the  special  sciences  can 
satisfaction  be  found  for  man's  desire  for  integrity,  harmony, 
completeness,  and  stability  in  the  world  which  is  the  objective 
condition  of  his  experience  and  his  desire.  In  brief,  the  deepest 
need  of  man  as  a  reflective  being  is  for  a  coherent  and  stable 
universe,  a  dependable  order  with  which  he  can  put  himself  in 
harmony.  Thus  metaphysics  and  religion  are  alike  in  that  they 
both  seek  to  satisfy  the  human  demand  for  a  comprehensive  and 
consistent  world  view,  for  a  doctrine  of  the  true  meaning  and 
value  of  human  life  in  its  relation  to  the  world-whole.  The 
religious  devotee  and  the  philosopher  alike  endeavor  "to  live 
resolutely  in  the  Whole,  the  Good,  the  True."  Essential  to 
both  are  beliefs  in  regard  to  the  nature  of  reality  as  a  whole 
and  in  regard  to  the  place  of  human  values  in  reality.  And 
the  fundamental  difference  between  ethics  or  systematic  doc- 
trines  in  regard  to  morality  on  the  one  hand,  and  metaphysics 
and  religion  on  the  other  hand,  is  that,  whereas  in  the  moral 
systems  we  have  beliefs  in  regard  to  what  are  the  true  values 
of  life,  in  metaphysics  and  religion  we  have  doctrines  as  to  the 
place  of  these  true  values  in  the  total  scheme  of  reality.  I 
remark,  in  passing,  that  the  idea  frequently  broached  that  the 
way  to  escape  from  the  difficulties  of  reconciling  religious 
-mas  and  scientific  dogmas  is  to  make  religion  undogmatic 
or  nondoctrinal,  to  turn  it  into  a  system  of  pure  morals  or  even 
morals  touched  with  emotion,  is  to  disembowel  religion.     While 

536 


METAPHYSICS  AND   RELIGION  537 

admitting  the  significant  difference  between  theology,  the  sys- 
tematic theory  of  religion,  and  religion  as  an  actual  attitude  of 
mind,  I  must  insist  that  a  religion  which  involves  no  doctrines 
or  definite  beliefs  in  regard  to  the  nature  and  meaning  of  reality 
as  a  whole  is  no  religion  for  a  reasonable  being.  If  morality 
touched  with  emotion  be  a  religion,  that  can  only  be  because  the 
emotion  with  which  morality  is  touched  is  one  of  reasonable  con- 
fidence in,  and  reverent  admiration  for,  the  order  of  the  universe; 
and  certainly  such  an  emotional  attitude  cannot  exist  without  a 
definite  belief  as  to  what  really  is  the  order  of  the  universe.  Every 
religion  which  has  counted  for  anything  in  human  life  has  in- 
volved quite  specific  beliefs  as  to  the  nature  of  reality  as  a  whole, 
and,  more  particularly,  as  to  man's  place  therein.  The  idea  of 
God,  or,  in  more  abstract  terms,  of  the  universal  and  eternal 
reality,  is  the  fundamental  concept  of  religion.  A  religion  which 
does  not  tie  the  soul  of  man  up  with  some  permanent  reality  be- 
yond the  shows  of  sense  is  no  religion.  The  de-natured  defini- 
tions of  a  religion  without  a  God-idea,  which  various  writers 
have  offered  as  a  way  out  of  the  difficulties  in  squaring  religion 
with  materialism,  do  not  correspond  to  any  historical  or  actual 
working  religion.  For  example,  to  identify  religion  with  the 
service  of  unrealized  and  purely  human  values,  while  denying  to 
these  values  a  cosmic  foundation,  is  a  confusion  of  thought. 

If  religion  and  metaphysics  arise  from  similar  motives  and 
have  similar  objects,  wherein  do  they  differ  ?  In  the  first  place, 
for  the  philosopher  they  do  not  differ.  For,  since  a  philosopher's 
metaphysics  is  his  rationally  worked  out  theory  of  reality,  his 
religious  attitude  must  take  its  color  from  his  doctrine  of  reality, 
just  as  the  religion  of  a  nonphilosophical  person  must  take  its 
color  from  theological  dogmas  which  he  accepts  and  believes.  In 
the  second  place,  the  theological  dogmas  accepted  and  believed  by 
the  nonphilosophical  religionist  are  traditional  forms  of  meta- 
physics which  he  accepts  without  critical  examination.  The  theol- 
ogy of  a  church,  for  example,  consists  of  certain  propositions  in 
regard  to  God,  man,  and  nature,  which  involve  a  certain  attitude 
of  mind  and  will.  These  propositions  have  been  formulated  in 
the  past,  by  certain  persons  or  groups  of  persons  assumed  to  have 
been  competent  in  ability  and  authority  to  interpret  the  revela- 
tions as  to  the  ultimate  nature  of  reality  and  the  value  and  destiny 
of  the  soul  made  by  divinely  accredited  teachers  and  revealers. 


538  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

A  church  is  a  social  institution  established  and  carried  on  to 
propagate  a  specific  type  of  conduct  based  on  an  accepted  type 
of  religious  metaphysics. 

A  man's  reaction  to  the  nature  of  things  as  a  whole  involves 
his  own  nature  as  a  whole.    It  brings  into  play  his  emotional  and 
will  attitudes,  no  less  than  his  imaginative  and  conceptual  powers. 
A  religious  attitude  is  the  response  to  the  demand  of  the  whole 
personality  for  a  perfect  and  enduring  life  in  which  the  buffeted 
and  distraught  individual  life  or  group  life  can  find  repose  and 
strength.    "Underneath  are  the  everlasting  arms."    The  psychical 
complexion  of  religious  experience  and  attitude  varies  with  in- 
dividuals, groups,  and  epochs  of  culture.     In  all  cases,  however, 
the  need  for  a  religious  faith  goes  down  into  the  very  roots  of  the 
personal  and  social  life — and  these  roots  are  the  feelings   and 
emotions  in  which  the  self  or  the  group  assumes  the  supremacy 
and  the  permanence  of  their  fundamental  valuations  of  life.     Be- 
cause of  lack  of  training,  inclination,  or  leisure,  and  in  part  too, 
because  of  lack  of  capacity,  the  average  person  does  not  seriously 
attempt  to  think  out  for  himself  a  doctrine  of  ultimate  reality  and 
of   values.      He   takes    these,    for    the   most    part,    second-hand. 
Through  the  influence  of  suggestion  and  imitation  he  accepts  the 
dogmas  of  the  group  in  which  he  is  nurtured.    If  he  breaks  away 
from  them,  under  strong  emotional  stress,  he  is  very  likely  to 
accept  the  dogmas  of  some  other  group.    In  the  religious  attitude 
of  the  average  person  reflective  thinking  plays  a  secondary  role. 
Social  suggestion,  imitation,  the  sentiment  of  group  loyalty,  are 
the  most  powerful  factors  in   determining  the   ordinary  man's 
religious  attitude.     The  religious  group  and  the  individual,  as  a 
member  of  the  group,  in  order  that  they  may  go  forward  in  the 
work  of  realizing  the  highest  values  of  life,  and  may  find  con- 
solation for  the  present  loss  of  values,  make  a  wager  of  faith. 
They  take  risks  because  of  the  interests  at  stake.    The  need  for  ac- 
tion, or  the  need  for  consolation,  is  great  and  urgent,  and  there 
is  not  time  or  inclination  for  an  unbiased  investigation  in  this 
most  difficult  and  comprehensive  of  subjects— the  problem  of  the 
nature  of  reality— so  the  traditional  dogma  is  accepted. 

Thus,  religious  dogmas  are  accepted  because  they  meet  the 
urgent  needs  of  the  group  or  the  individual;  but  these  needs  in 
turn  have  been  molded  by  the  influence  of  the  group— the  church. 
-Now,  the  fact  that  an  individual  wants  a  certain  thing  is  not 


METAPHYSICS  AND  RELIGION  539 

sufficient  evidence  either  that  he  will  get  it  or  that  he  ought  to 
get  it.  But,  if  many  individuals,  and  especially  in  a  long  suc- 
cession of  generations,  have  seemed  to  want  the  same  things,  that 
is  commonly  taken  as  a  reason  for  the  justice  of  the  want  and  the 
likelihood  of  its  satisfaction.  It  is  forgotten  that  similarity  of 
wants  only  proves  that  we  are  all  made  of  the  same  old  needy 
human  nature.  It  is  a  fact  that  the  very  persistence  of  a  certain 
social  type  of  conduct  and  belief  creates  a  presumption  of  its  cor- 
rectness. The  history  of  theology  and  religion  abundantly  sub- 
stantiate the  view  that  the  modifications  which  they  undergo  are 
determined  chiefly  by  the  whole  complex  of  cultural  factors  oper- 
ating in  an  epoch;  and  that,  by  reason  of  social  and  mental  in- 
ertia, once  a  type  has  become  established,  it  tends  to  persist ;  for 
example,  the  juristic  or  substitutionary  theories  of  the  atonement 
in  Saint  Augustine  and  his  successors  took  their  color  from  the 
legal  theories  and  practices  of  the  feudal  Empire  engaged  in 
trying  to  maintain  itself  and  keep  the  peace  amidst  the  welter 
of  semi-barbarians  which  it  comprehended.  Such  a  theory  simply 
could  not  have  been  originated  in  the  Athens  of  Socrates  and 
Plato. 

The  authority  of  the  group  code  of  conduct  and  of  dogmas  is 
referred  back  to  its  source  in  a  divine  revealer.  Moses,  Jesus, 
Mohammed,  are  regarded  in  their  respective  religions  as  the  media 
of  specific  primary  revelations.  The  church  becomes  the  authori- 
tative custodian,  interpreter  and  dispenser  of  the  primary  revela- 
tions, the  latter  being  usually  enshrined  in  sacred  oracles.  The 
church  has  its  constituted  authorities  for  the  interpretation  of 
the  oracles.  Thus,  in  this,  the  most  persistent  type  of  religion, 
the  group  organization  and  the  traditions  of  the  group  mind,  play 
the  principal  part.  The  individual's  spirit  is  subordinate  to  the 
group  spirit.  It  is  only  as  a  loyal  member  of  the  group  that  he 
can  approach  the  deity  to  gain  strength  or  favor  from  him.  Early 
morality  is  tribal  custom,  and  early  religion  is  tribal  feeling  and 
tribal  ceremonial  which  involves  tribal  welfare.  Organized  re- 
ligion (and  most  of  the  phenomena  of  religion  still  have  to  do 
with  organized  or  institutional  religion)  is  the  centralized  expres- 
sion of  the  social  bond.  All  public  religious  rites,  ceremonies,  and 
obligatory  acts,  have  to  do  with  the  sense  of  social  solidarity.  The 
relationship  to  the  divine  is  the  culminating  expression  of  group- 
relationship.     Organized  religion  is  thus,  from  the  outset,  the 


540  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

expression  and  consolidation  of  social  values.  It  seems  to  be  only 
late  in  the  history  of  religion  that  the  individualistic  sense  of 
private  personal  relationship  to  the  divine  comes  into  play.1 
Even  thereafter  the  authority  of  social  tradition  and  organization 
continue  to  play  the  major  role  in  determining  the  character  and 
expressions  of  the  religious  life.  Common  worship,  common  be- 
liefs and  acts,  are  normal  and  most  frequent  phenomena  of  reli- 
gion. Even  the  enlightened  individual  to-day  is  deeply  influenced 
in  his  religious  attitude  by  tradition,  early  training,  and  environ- 
ment. 

On  the  other  hand,  just  as  morality  has  progressed  from 
tribal  custom  to  the  ethics  of  free  and  rational  personality,  so 
religion  has  progressed;  and  the  highest  type  of  religion  is  that 
which  has  its  roots  in  the  attitudes  and  evaluations  of  free  per- 
sonalities. This  is  all  the  more  the  case  when  the  religious  atti- 
tudes of  free  personalities  involve  a  clear  sense  of  the  religious 
basis  of  social  order,  cooperation,  fellowship,  and  loyalty  to  com- 
mon causes.  An  increasing  recognition  of  personal  freedom  and 
responsibility  in  matters  of  religious  faith  and  practice  means 
spiritual  progress,  not  the  decay  of  religion. 

For  the  second  and  highest  form  of  religious  relation  is  the 
individual's  insight,  intuition,  or  act,  in  which  he  communes  with 
the  Divine  and  knows  and  obeys  the  Divine  Will  without  any 
traditional  or  social  intermediary.  The  individual  feels  himself 
in  some  sort  of  immediate  relation  to  the  Divine.  I  call  this 
form  "mysticism."  It  has  many  varieties,  from  the  sensuous 
emotionalistic  mysticism  of  the  Sufi  and  of  certain  Christian 
mystics,  to  the  intellectual  vision  of  God  of  a  Plotinus  or  a 
Spinoza,  the  austere  moral  visions  of  the  Hebrew  prophets,  and 
the  simple  ethical  or  "spiritual"  mysticism  of  Jesus,  St.  John  and 
St.  Paul  The  highest  type  of  religion  is  ethical  mysticism.  This 
is  faith  in,  service  of,  and  communion  with  the  Highest  or  Perfect 
Being  regarded  as  the  living  and  transcendent  ground  of  the 
supreme  spiritual  values— 4n  short  as  the  source  and  sustainer 
of  moral  personality  and  the  ideal  social  order. 

Ethical  mysticism  has,  of  course,  in  the  history  of  religion, 
been  made  the  starting  point  for  new  religions  of  authority,  based 
on  the  assumption  of  a  static  and  finished  revelation  expressed 

I^k/jeremSk,  ^Z,^^^  °f  Isr&e1'  the  ™k  of  the  »«*»- 


METAPHYSICS  AND  RELIGION  541 

through  supernatural  events,  written  down  in  sacred  books,  and 
conserved  by  sacred  organizations.  Thus  the  fresh  and  first-hand 
vision  of  new  spiritual  ideals  has  been  dimmed  and  even  lost.  For 
all  modes  of  religious  experience  and  expression  intermingle  in 
religious  history.  Organized  Christianity  contains  elements  of 
dualistic  supernaturalism,  of  magic  and  mythmaking,  of  authority 
worship,  of  emotional  and  speculative  mysticism,  of  prophetic  and 
ethical  freedom. 

Once  it  is  admitted  that  the  authority  of  the  group  and  its 
traditions  are  not  normative  for  the  determination  of  the  doctrine 
of  reality  and  of  human  values,  there  are  only  two  ways  open  to 
such  doctrine — one  is  the  way  of  unregulated  individual  senti- 
ment and  the  other  is  the  way  of  reason.  The  way  of  individual 
sentiment  may  satisfy  its  possessor  but  it  does  not,  by  itself,  lead 
to  any  socially  valid  principles. 

The  way  of  reason  is  metaphysics  or  rational  theology.  From 
the  standpoint  of  reason  the  authority  of  an  organized  social  group 
and  its  traditions  cannot  be  accepted  without  inquiry,  for,  in  the 
first  place,  there  are  so  many  of  them  and  they  are  discordant; 
in  the  second  place,  historical  inquiry  shows  that  they  are  the 
resultants  of  a  complex  of  cultural  traditions — political,  economic, 
intellectual,  physical,  and  so  forth.  The  authority  of  sacred 
oracles  is  subjected  similarly  to  the  dissolving  power  of  critical 
historical  inquiry.  Miracles  do  not  authenticate  revelation ;  for, 
first,  they  are  claimed  as  the  authenticating  grounds  of  conflict- 
ing religious  systems;  second,  if  by  miracles  be  meant  especially 
divine  interpositions  which  interrupt  the  order  of  nature,  they  are 
not  in  harmony  with  the  tested  methods  and  principles  of  science ; 
and  third,  if  by  miracle  be  meant  the  manifestation  of  a  higher 
law  which  we  do  not  understand,  the  argument  is  an  appeal  to 
ignorance. 

No  supposed  occurrence  in  the  past  history  of  the  race  can 
be  accepted,  without  critical  inquiry,  as  rational  authentication 
of  dogmas  concerning  the  nature  of  reality.  For  any  assumed 
extraordinary  occurrence  or  extraordinary  personality  could  be 
accepted  as  the  source  of  a  revelation  of  the  nature  of  reality,  only 
if  it  could  be  brought  into  harmony  with  the  interpretation  of 
present  and  living  experience  in  the  light  of  reason.  To  admit 
this  principle  is  to  admit  the  superior  authority  of  the  rational 
interpretation  of  actual  experience  and  of  man's  present  valua- 


542  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

tions.  As  Lessing  and  Fichte  put  it,  not  the  historical,  only  the 
metaphysical  can  save  us.  This  is  not  to  deny  that  the  words 
and  deeds  of  great  historical  personalities  may  illumine  the  pres- 
ent problems  of  life  and  reality.  If  Plato  or  Aristotle  can  still 
instruct  us  in  regard  to  thought,  values  and  reality,  so  can  Jesus  or 
St.  John.  But  if  we  cannot  accept  the  doctrines  of  Plato,  in  so 
far  as  they  are  inconsistent  with  the  rational  interpretation  of  our 
actual  data  concerning  nature  and  man,  no  more  can  we  accept 
doctrines  or  supposed  deeds  of  Jesus  that  are  not  in  harmony  with 
such  interpretations.  The  only  witness  that  has  any  final  authority 
is  the  witness  of  the  rational  spirit  .in  its  work  of  interpreting  and 
organizing  the  facts  of  living  experience.  In  short,  metaphysics, 
as  the  persistent  effort  of  the  human  reason  to  attain  a  compre- 
hensive and  coherent  insight  into  the  nature  of  reality  as  a  whole 
and  the  place  of  human  values  therein,  is  the  only  rational  foun- 
dation for  a  religious  doctrine  of  the  world.  If  one  abandon 
subjection  to  group  suggestion  and  imitation,  submission  to  the 
authority  of  historical  organizations  and  their  traditions,  and 
decline  to  become  the  prey  of  unregulated  emotionalism,  the  only 
way  for  the  attainment  of  a  religious  world  view  that  is  left 
for  him  is  the  way  of  metaphysics. 

Special  sciences  cannot  give  us  a  world  view  for  two  reasons: 
(1)  No  special  science,  for  example  physics,  biology,  or  psychol- 
ogy, has  for  its  province  the  coordination  into  a  harmonious  syn- 
thesis of  the  fundamental  outlines  of  a  rational  conception  of  the 
world.  This  is  the  province  of  metaphysics.  (2)  With  respect 
to  human  values,  with  regard  to  the  nature  of  truth,  of  goodness, 
of  beauty  and  love  and  their  interrelations,  the  special  sciences 
are  neutral;  they  do  not  deal  with  the  problem  of  values.  It  is 
the  province  of  metaphysics  to  formulate  a  doctrine  of  values 
and  of  the  place  of  values  in  reality. 

Religion  is  essentially  a  doctrine  of  values  and  the  place  of 
values  in  reality.  Eeligion  is  not  concerned  directly  with  the 
physical  order,  but  only  indirectly  with  the  relation  of  the  physical 
order  to  the  order  of  personal  and  social  values.  It  will  greatly 
conduce  to  the  vitality  of  religion  when  its  representative  teachers 
abandon,  once  and  for  all,  the  intellectual  and  spiritual  confusion 
involved  in  the  intermingling  of  the  exposition  and  service  of 
spiritual  values  with  primitive  and  discredited  cosmologies.  If 
the  religionist  will  leave  the  interpretation  of  the  genesis  of  the 


METAPHYSICS  AND   RELIGION  543 

physical  order  to  the  sciences,  if  he  will  abandon  the  mistaken 
effort  to  validate  religious  values  in  terms  of  an  invalid  theory 
or  dogma  concerning  nature,  and  abandon  the  attempt  to  authen- 
ticate the  values  of  the  spirit  in  terms  of  physical  miracles  which 
cannot  themselves  be  validated,  a  great  gain  will  be  won.  Reli- 
gious thought  and  devotion  can  then  be  concentrated  upon  the 
clarification,  intensification,  and  realization  of  spiritual  values. 
Let  the  religionist  recognize  too  that  the  problem  of  the  relation 
of  spiritual  values  to  the  nature  of  reality  as  a  whole  is  one  to  be 
attacked  by  rational  reflection;  that  is,  by  philosophy  or  meta- 
physics. Thus,  by  applying  the  traditional  and  organized  force 
of  religious  institutions  to  the  spread  of  rational  reflection  in 
regard  to  the  fundamental  problems  of  human  life,  he  will  do 
his  part  in  saving  humanity  from  the  recrudescence  of  blind  super- 
stition, on  the  one  hand ;  and  from  the  social  and  moral  confusion 
that  results  from  the  disintegration  of  traditional  institutions  and 
beliefs,  on  the  other  hand.  "Ye  shall  know  the  truth  and  the  truth 
shall  make  you  free."  The  truth  can  be  known  only  through  the 
exercise  of  the  rational  spirit.  In  this  way  alone  are  we  made 
truly  free,  even  though  what  we  know  is  the  uncertainty  of  our 
knowledge. 

The  interpretation  of  the  meaning  of  religion  and  the  de- 
termination of  its  function  and  validity  in  the  lives  of  rational 
beings  is  thus  a  principal  task  of  metaphysics.  Thus  far,  metw- 
physics  is  the  philosophy  of  religion.  Indeed,  the  principal  parts 
of  metaphysics  are  the  philosophy  of  knowledge,  of  nature,  and 
of  human  personality ;  and  the  philosophy  of  religion  is  the  culmi- 
nating point  in  the  metaphysics  of  personality. 

It  is  the  province  of  the  comparative  philosophy  of  religions 
to  determine  the  psychological  features  of  the  chief  types  of 
religious  attitude  and  experience  in  individuals;  to  consider  the 
functions  of  religious  institutions  (in  which  are  included  systems 
of  religious  dogmas  or  doctrines)  in  the  social  history  of  the 
race;  to  trace  the  evolution  of  religion  from  its  beginnings  in 
animatistic  nature  worship,  through  the  most  significant  stages, 
from  crude  polydsemonism  to  the  most  elevated  forms  of  ethical 
and  spiritual  religion  in  which  the  values  of  a  free  personal  and 
communal  life  become  the  central  norms  for  the  interpretation 
of  reality;  to  weigh  the  respective  values,  for  man's  cultural  de- 
velopment, of  the  principal  types  of  religious  attitude  and  expres- 


544  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

sion.    Finally,  it  is  the  province  of  the  philosophy  of  religion,  as 
metaphysics,  to  weigh  the  claims  of  religion  to  embody  truth  as 
to  the  relation  of  human  values  to  the  order  of  the  universe,  in 
the  light  of  the  general  principles  of  the  scientific  theory  of  knowl- 
edge and  cosmology.     In  particular,  the  following  questions  con- 
stitute the  critical  problems  for  an  epistemology  and  metaphysics 
of  religion:  (1)  Is  there  a  specific  kind  of  religious  knowledge- 
personal  intuition  and  revelation  of  the  divine  order  as  embodied 
in  the  religious  genius?     If  personality  be  the  best  clue  to  the 
meaning  of  the  world  process;  then,  since  religion  involves  the 
entire  personality,  it  may  be  that  the  religious  genius  is  a  revealer 
of  the  meaning  and  vocation  of  personality  in  a  fuller  sense  than 
the  scientific,  the  practical,  or  the  artistic  genius.     (Indeed,  every 
significant  religious  attitude  seems  to  be  a  poetry  of  values  cloth- 
ing a  metaphysical  content.)     (2)  What  is  the  nature,  value  and 
destiny  of  human  personality  ?     (These  are  most  crucial  questions 
for  the  metaphysics  of  religion.)      (3)  How  are  we  to  conceive 
the  nature  of  God  and  His  relation  to  man?     Can  we  on  ra- 
tional grounds,  and  in  the  light  of  the  various  main  aspects  of 
experience,   establish   a   justification  for   a  rational   faith   in' a 
supreme  spiritual  reality  who,   as   the  creative   and   sustaining 
ground  of  all  existence,  is  the  absolute  good  or  ground  of  spiritual 
values  ?    If  we  have  the  right  to  believe  in  such  a  being,  what  are, 
and  what  may  become,  the  relations  of  the  human  spirit  to  Him  ? 
What  is  the  relation  of  the  evil  in  the  world  to  Him  ?     Finally, 
what  is  the  relation  of  the  whole  process  of  natural  and  human 
history  to  His  life  and  activity?     Concerning  these  problems  of 
the  metaphysics  of  religion  I  have  already  given  such  answers  as 
I  could.     If  I  were  to  write  other  volumes  on  this  subject,  they 
would  consist  only  in  amplifications  and  illustrations  of  the  views 
hereinbefore  advanced. 

The  following  remarks  may  serve  to  make  the  foregoing  state- 
ments clearer.  Religion  has  a  social-historical  character,  since 
religious  conceptions  of  value  are  personal  affirmations  and  experi- 
ences, and  persons  always  live  in  social  and  historical  connections 
as  members  of  specific  cultures.  Because  of  these  social  and 
cultural  influences  religion  is  ever  associated  with  the  changing 
intellectual,  economic,  political,  and  artistic  complexions  of  his- 
torical cultures.  No  religious  genius  has  ever  existed  who  has 
not  spoken  his  spiritual  message  in  terms  of  the  mental-social  life 


METAPHYSICS  AND  RELIGION  545 

of  his  own  day  and  generation.  Religion  is  a  projection  on  the 
roaring  loom  of  time  of  a  concentration  or  unified  complex 
of  psychical  values.  What  these  values  are  in  content,  and  what 
their  status  is  in  relation  to  the  other  values  of  culture,  is  always 
determined  by  the  reaction  of  the  creative  personalities,  who 
found  and  modify  religious  traditions,  to  the  cultural  complexes 
of  their  own  times  and  places  in  history.  Prophets,  founders,  and 
reformers  of  religion  appear  at  definite  points  in  the  stream  of 
historical  evolution.  They  occupy  determinate  situations  in  the 
cultural  life  of  humanity  and  their  individual  creativeness  is  due 
to  the  interplay  of  a  powerful  personality,  rich  in  moral  sensi- 
tiveness and  productive  imagination,  to  the  cultural  and  natural 
environment.  A  new  religious  system  thus  always  arises  in  the 
fullness  of  time — in  other  words,  when  several  clashing  and  rein- 
forcing cultural  currents  are  moving  in  the  social  life,  struggling 
and  blending  together.  Hebrew  prophetism  arose  in  the  moment 
of  such  a  crisis  in  Hebrew  social  life.  Ancient  Christianity 
arose  when  richer  and  more  varied  cultural  currents  met  and 
partially  opposed  one  another,  partially  blended  together  in  the 
much  richer  stream  of  Hellenistic-Roman  culture,  cross-fertilized 
with  the  last  and  profoundest  expression  of  the  spirit  of  Hebrew 
prophetism.  Ancient  Christianity  was  a  creative  spiritual  syn- 
thesis. The  elements  which  gave  rise  to  it  were  the  powerful 
and  creative  personalities  of  Jesus,  St.  John,  St.  Paul,  and  others, 
the  neo-Platonic  and  Stoic  religious  philosophies,  and  the  mystery 
religions. 

The  supreme  paradox  of  the  religious  attitude,  of  religious 
experience  and  faith,  is  that,  while  it  is  always  historically  or  cul- 
turally conditioned,  it  is  essentially  faith  in  the  meta-historical  or 
eternal  quality  of  the  values  which  it  sees  and  serves.  There  is 
no  genuine  religious  attitude,  whether  of  revealer,  prophet,  mystic, 
or  humblest  worshiper,  that  does  not,  to  the  experient,  bear  the 
quality  of  lifting  his  soul  and  its  values  and  aspirations  above 
the  raging  torrent  of  time.  For  religion  is  essentially  concerned 
with  God  as  the  perfect  embodiment  of  the  supreme  values  of 
life;  and  with  the  relation  of  the  soul  of  the  individual,  and  of 
the  group  life  in  which  he  participates,  to  a  Divine  Reality  in 
which  there  is  neither  variableness  nor  shadow  of  turning.  But 
this  supreme  paradox  is  not  peculiar  to  religion,  in  the  more 
specialized  sense  of  the  term.    It  is  the  final  paradox  which  per- 


546  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

vades  man's  whole  spiritual  life,  which  enters  into  every  function 
of  his  soul.  Now  and  here  man  seeks,  finds  and  contemplates 
truth  and  goodness,  but  the  true  and  the  good  must  be  eternally 
valid  as  the  apprehension  of  reality.  Now  and  here  he  creates 
and  enjoys  beauty,  but  beauty  must  be  the  revelation  to  his  soul 
of  the  eternal  harmony.  Now  and  here  he  seeks  fellowship,  jus- 
tice, and  integrity,  but  these  moral  qualities  must  have  a  perma- 
nent nature,  otherwise  they  would  sicken  and  die  to-day.  He  loves 
his  fellows,  he  loves  beauty,  harmony,  and  justice.  At  once  he 
is  gone  or  the  objects  of  his  love  have  vanished;  but  they  were 
eternal  values.  All  that  man  values,  strives  for,  loves,  and  serves 
seems  to  disappear  in  the  cruel  maw  of  all-devouring  time.  In 
religion  man  denies  that  his  cherished  values  vanish  into  the  dark 
backward  and  abysm  of  time.  In  religion  he  affirms,  in  the  fleeing 
moment,  the  eternity  of  values.  Thus  the  paradox  of  religion  is 
simply  the  consummate  expression  of  the  paradox  of  life.  Re- 
ligion sees  and  feels  under  the  form  of  eternity.  If  there  be  noth- 
ing eternal  but  the  restless  and  relentless  passage  of  all  values 
out  of  nothingness  through  a  feeble  and  vacillating  existence  into 
nothingness  again,  then  all  religion  is  a  vain  delusion.  Then  the 
first  and  last  word  of  metaphysical  systems  must  be  that  of  a 
mere  Nirvana — an  eternity  of  nothingness.  Then  all  is  vanity 
— including  the  quest  of  the  scientist  for  the  truth,  of  the  moral- 
ist for  justice  and  integrity,  of  the  devotee  for  love  and  beauty. 
And  the  proposition  that  all  is  vanity  and  nothingness  is  vain; 
the  only  remedy  for  the  troubles  of  man,  the  ills  of  society,  and 
the  puzzles  of  thought,  is  to  cease  to  think  and  to  live,  if  live  we 
must,  by  instinct  alone. 

But  while  we  cannot  do  that  and  while  metaphysics  may  con- 
sist "in  finding  bad  reasons  for  what  we  believe  in  instinct,  to 
seek  those  reasons,  is  no  less  an  instinct,"  2  I  hope  that,  without 
further  explication,  I  have  made  it  clear  that  those  who  contemn 
religion  and  metaphysics  put  themselves  in  the  ridiculous  position 
of  beings  who,  while  unwilling  to  give  up  thinking  entirely,  are 
unwilling  to  think  things  through  to  the  end,  because  it  is  hard 
work.  I  do  not  mean  that  it  is  everybody's  business  to  think 
through  these  weighty  and  difficult  problems  to  the  end  for  him- 
self, but  I  do  say  that  he  who  refuses  to  give  a  hearing  to  those 


•  F.  H.  Bradley,  Appearance  and  Reality,  Preface. 


METAPHYSICS  AND   RELIGION  547 

who  do  attempt  to  think  them  through,  on  the  ground  that  the 
work  is  troublesome  and  yields  no  quick  returns  or  even  obvious 
profits  in  the  end,  stultifies  himself  as  a  thinking  being.  Every 
man  to  his  taste,  but  let  him  who  is  satisfied  to  be  an  oyster  be 
a  consistent  oyster  and  live  the  part,  thereby  ceasing  to  pretend 
to  be  a  man!  If  the  power  of  rational  reflection  be  one  of  the 
differentiae  of  human  beings,  then  he  who  refuses  to  carry  on  this 
power  to  the  point  where  it  deals  with  the  highest  concerns  of 
reflective  life  refuses  to  be  truly  human.  Most  stultifying  and 
self-contradictory  are  those  who,  while  blatantly  proclaiming  the 
power  of  thought  to  probe,  to  understand,  and  to  control  physical 
data,  biological  data,  and  sociological  data,  sneer  contemptuously 
at  metaphysics  and  theology,  because  the  latter  do  not  enable  men 
to  make  bigger  machines,  and  more  material  goods,  to  build  sky- 
scrapers, or  to  increase  dividends. 

And  those  who  would  reconstruct  society  and  who  would  heal 
the  divisions  in  the  body  politic  without  a  metaphysics  or  religion, 
simply  by  collecting  economic  and  sociological  data  and  directing 
a  new  social  polity  based  on  such  data  alone,  are  attempting  to 
build  on  a  quicksand.  Let  philosopher  and  religionist  beware  of 
hearkening  to  the  clamor  that  they  become  practical  sociologists, 
that  they  give  up  speculation  and  contemplation,  and  jump  into 
the  hurly-burly  of  political  and  economic  reconstruction.  How 
can  we  reconstruct  society  unless  we  have  first  determined  the 
goods,  the  values  or  ends,  which  we  ought  to  seek  ?  And  how  can 
we  determine  the  meanings  of  good  and  value  without  a  reasoned 
inquiry  into  the  nature,  value  and  destiny  of  human  personality 
and  its  place  in  the  universe  ?  I  hold  that  even  imperfect  religion 
is  a  much  surer  guide  to  social  reconstruction  than  a  crassly  posi- 
tivistic  and  utilitarian  social  polity,  based  on  pseudo-scientific 
sociological  generalizations. 

Inasmuch  as  religion  is  the  affirmation  that  the  higher  values, 
that  are  imagined,  worshiped,  and  served  in  human  existence, 
and  by  which  the  spirit  of  man  is  thus  possessed,  have  a  secure 
and  enduring  standing  in  the  nature  of  reality,  metaphysics  is, 
thus  far,  simply  the  method  of  rational  interpretation  and  justi- 
fication of  religion.  The  fact  that  the  religious  attitude  is  pri- 
marily, in  its  popular  manifestations,  one  of  feeling  and  volition, 
and  only  secondarily  a  reflecting  attitude,  whereas,  the  philo- 
sophical attitude  is  one  of  sustained  rational  inquiry;  must  not 


548  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

blind  us  to  their  community  of  aim:  to  lay  hold  on  the  world, 
and  to  serve  the  higher  spiritual  values,  to  discover,  and  to  live 
in  and  for  the  transcendent  values,  by  every  function  of  our  psy- 
chical being.  Philosophy,  like  religion,  involves  faith  in  the  en- 
during values  of  existence;  but  philosophy  sets  the  value  of  ra- 
tional comprehension  and  harmonious  organization  of  all  values 
in  the  light  of  thought  in  the  primary  place;  whereas  religion, 
in  its  traditional  and  popular  manifestations,  sets  the  emotional 
and  volitional  values  in  the  primary  place.  There  is  between  them 
no  inevitable  incompatibility.  The  light  of  reason  is  not  a  killing 
frost  that  destroys  the  emotional  and  practical  values;  nor  can 
the  latter  values  be  well  served  without  rational  reflection.  In- 
deed, there  is  a  deeper  harmony  between  higher  manifestations  of 
religion  and  philosophy :  for,  as  Plato  long  ago  taught,  the  motive 
of  both  is  love — love  for  the  good,  the  true,  and  for  spiritual 
beauty ;  for  that  which  abides  when  all  else  seems  to  suffer  shock, 
for  the  whole  and  eternal.  If  the  philosopher's  love  is  directed 
chiefly  towards  ideals  or  universal  values,  he  must  not  forget  that 
these  actually  live  and  move  and  have  their  being  only  in  persons. 
If  the  religionist  live  primarily  for  souls  or  persons,  he  must  not 
forget  that  souls  become  persons  and  gain  enduring  value  and 
reality  only  in  so  far  as  they  become  the  embodiments  and  minis- 
trants  of  ideals  or  universal  values. 

Theology,  if  it  is  to  be  distinguished  from  metaphysics,  can 
only  be  the  historical  and  systematic  exposition  of  the  doctrines 
which  are  normative  in  and  for  a  specific  historical  religious  insti- 
tution— a  church.  Theology  is  thus  the  offspring  of  a  social  and 
historical  organization  or  institution.  It  has  its  genesis  in  the 
value-experiences,  and  faith-affirmations,  in  the  cults  and  polities, 
that  have  arisen  and  developed  in  specific  and  historically  con- 
tinuous social  groups.  Thus  a  universal  theology  would  be  iden- 
tical with  a  philosophy  or  metaphysics  of  religion.  Thus,  when 
theology  ceases  to  be  the  purely  historical  and  systematic  exposi- 
tion of  the  dogmatic  foundations  of  the  value-experiences,  and 
faith-affirmations,  the  cults  and  polities,  of  specific  historical  or- 
ganizations or  churches,  and  seeks  to  establish  as  universally 
normative  certain  interpretations  of  religious  life,  it  must  become 
identical  with  philosophy  or  metaphysics  of  religion. 

In  short,  the  final  account  of  the  claims  of  religion  to  involve 
a  universally  significant  and  valid  truth  must  be  taken  by  a  meta- 


METAPHYSICS  AND  RELIGION  549 

physics  of  human  values;  in  other  words,  by  a  rational  construc- 
tion which  will  interpret  the  controlling  ideals  of  man's  spiritual 
life — truth,  beauty,  love  and  all  forms  of  human  value — and 
organize  these  into  a  harmonious  system;  and  which  will  weigh 
the  final  question  as  to  our  right  to  believe  that  these  values  are 
at  home  in  the  universe. 

Religion,  as  a  vital  force  in  society  and  history  and  in  indi- 
vidual lives,  is  not  a  by-product  of  philosophy.  It  is  a  native  and 
bulky  factor  in  man's  cultural  life.  It  contributes  very  weighty 
data  which  metaphysics  or  philosophy  must  take  into  account  in 
framing  a  world  view.  It  is  as  expressions  of  the  creative  spirit- 
ual development  of  individuals,  peoples,  and  cultures,  that  reli- 
gions and  theologies  are  taken  account  of  by  philosophy ;  in  other 
words,  as  living  documents  for  the  understanding  of  human  ex- 
perience, human  feeling,  volition,  and  thought,  as  reactions  to  the 
spectacle  and  impact  of  the  sum  of  things.  The  great  historical 
theologies,  for  example,  of  Saint  Paul,  Saint  John,  Origen,  Saint 
Augustine,  Calvin,  Schleiermacher,  sprang  from  the  interaction 
of  sensitive  and  creative  personalities  with  the  spiritual  currents 
of  their  times.  No  historical  theology  can  be  fully  valid  for  an- 
other and  a  different  time.  But  a  theology  from  the  past,  like 
a  philosophy  or  a  social  polity,  may  have  considerable  value  for 
the  present.  Men  change,  but  mankind  remains  the  same;  in 
other  words,  while  the  intellectual  and  general  spiritual  climate 
undergo  secular  changes,  there  are  permanent  needs,  interests,  and 
values  in  human  nature.  Human  nature  is  plastic,  modifiable, 
but  it  does  not  seem  to  undergo  great  metamorphoses. 

II.     Is  There  Immediacy  in  Religious  Knowledge? 

All  genuine  first-hand  religion,  whether  of  the  learned  or  un- 
learned, involves  the  belief  in  the  experience  of  a  personal  rela- 
tion to  the  Highest.3  This  is  true,  I  hold,  even  where  the  Highest 
is  not  conceived  as  a  Person  or  Personality.  Even  in  Buddhism, 
although  in  its  origin  it  was  a  religion  without  God,  redemption 
or  salvation  is  an  immediate  or  mystical  union  of  the  individual 
with  the  absolute — the  state  of  Nirvana.  It  is,  of  course,  true 
that  the  transcendency,  the  awful  mystery  and  majesty  of  God 

*Cf.  the  fine  discussion  of  this  matter  in  C.  C.  J.  Webb's  Divine  Person- 
ality and  Human  Life,  especially  Lecture  vii. 


550  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

may  be  so  emphasized,  as  in  some  phases  of  Judaism  and  Moham- 
medanism and,  frequently  even  in  Christianity,  as  to  render  the 
object  of  worship  inaccessible,  except  by  intermediary,  to  the 
devotee.  Nevertheless  the  very  heart  of  religion  is  union  or  com- 
munion in  feeling  or  immediate  experience,  and,  by  consequence 
thereof,  in  will,  of  the  devotee  with  the  Highest.  If  religious 
experience  be  valid,  then  the  worshiper's  claim  to  know  God 
immediately,  by  intuition  or  insight,  must  be  allowed  reasonable. 

Such  a  claim  cannot  be  disallowed  by  pointing  to  persons  who 
have  no  such  experiences  or  convictions;  any  more  than  we  can 
refute  the  validity  of  aesthetic  experience  by  pointing  out  that 
for  many  people  there  is  no  beauty  or  joy  in  poetry,  music  or 
painting  or  even  in  a  sunset  or  a  snow-capped  mountain  range. 
Indeed,  one  might  just  as  well  argue  that  the  color  spectrum  is 
unreal  because  one  is  blind.  It  takes  two  to  make  a  quarrel  or 
a  love  affair ;  and  it  takes  two  to  make  a  veridical  experience,  the 
experient  and  the  object. 

Indeed,  all  our  scientific,  as  well  as  our  aesthetic,  interpreta- 
tions are  based  on  immediate  experiences.  There  can  be  no  genu- 
ine knowledge  of  reality  except  in  so  far  as  there  are  veridical  data 
of  experience.  Those  who  would  rule  out  of  court  the  possibility 
of  an  immediate  experience  of  God,  on  the  ground  that  all  knowl- 
edge involves  mediation  or  experience,  forget  that  mediate  or 
inferential  knowledge  rests,  both  in  its  beginnings  and  its  succes- 
sive steps,  on  immediate  experiences  and  insights.  There  must 
be  data  of  sense  before  there  can  begin  to  be  a  knowledge  of  the 
physical  world.  Even  in  the  case  of  deductive  chains  of  reasoning 
each  link  is  based  on  intuitive  self-evidence.  There  is  no  opposi- 
tion between  immediacy  and  mediation ;  rather  an  interdepend- 
ence and  constant  interplay  back  and  forth.  We  reflect  upon, 
analyze  and  synthesize,  our  immediate  experiences  and  insights; 
and  thus,  through  mediate  reasoning,  gain  more  comprehensive 
intuitions.  I  would  say  that  immediate  knowledge  (in  perception 
and  intuition  of  self  and  other  selves)  is  always  the  basis  of  knowl- 
edge ;  mediate  reasoning,  both  inductive  and  deductive,  is  the  way 
to  reflective  insight  or  interpretation  of  the  primary  immediacies 
in  knowing ;  synthetic  intuition  is  the  goal.  Reflective  insight  is 
no  less  rational  because  it  is  direct  insight ;  it  is  no  less  intuitional 
because  it  is  reflective. 

But  it  is  objected  that  one  can  know  other  persons  only  by 


METAPHYSICS  AND   RELIGION  551 

analogical  inference,  and  if  one  cannot  know  a  human  person 
immediately  one  certainly  cannot  claim  to  have  an  immediate 
experience  of  the  Divine.    I  have  already  in  Book  I  and  Book  IV 
discussed  this  matter  fully.     I  have  argued  that  we  must  assume 
the  existence  of  other  selves  in  order  to  get  under  way  with  knowl- 
edge and  action.    There  is  no  escape  from  solipsism,  if  one  begins 
with  it.  Moreover,  one  cannot  really  begin  with  it.  In  fact  we  have 
an  immediate  acquaintance  with  other  selves,  just  as  we  have  an 
immediate  experience  of  physical  things.    Empathy  (Einfiihlung) 
is  the  technical  name  given  to  this  direct  experience  of  other  selves. 
My  intuition  of  another  self's  life  is  just  as  direct  as,  often  more 
so  than,  that  of  my  own  inner  life.     Indeed,  if  one  loves  another 
person,  one's  "sense"  of  that  person's  attitudes  and  feelings  may 
have  an  almost  uncanny  swiftness  and  sureness.     It  is  true  that 
one  may  be  mistaken  in  regard  to  the  minds  of  others.     It  is  true 
that  one's  immediate  experiences  of  the  presence  of  another  con- 
scious life  require  to  be  reflected  upon  and  corrected  by  mediate 
reasoning.     In  principle  there  is  no  difference  here  between  the 
knowledge  of  persons  and  the  knowledge  of  physical  things.     Im- 
mediacy in  both  cases  is  the  starting-point  and  goal ;  mediation 
by  discursive  inference  is  the  way,  and  this  way  is  a  succession  of 
immediate  or  self-evident  insights  which  play  back  and  forth ;  the 
process  of  inference  is  not  linear.    Objection  to  the  possibility  of 
immediate  communion  with  the  Highest  as  the  heart  of  religion 
may  be  drawn  from  the  countless  aberrations,  crudities  and  illu- 
sions with  which  the  history  of  religion  is  filled.     But,  in  prin- 
ciple, the  same  objection  might  be  raised  in  any  field.     The  more 
complex  and  significant  the  data  and  problems,  the  more  varying 
and  imperfect  must  be  the  actual  knowledge  as  compared  with  its 
object.     Such  a  trivial  and  abstract  proposition  as  2+1=1+2 
does  not  leave  us  much  room  for  error.     But  when  we  come  to 
the  canons  of  art  and  letters,  to  social  polity  and  personal  relations, 
we  have  rich  fields  for  partial  and  erroneous  interpretations.     Our 
individual  experiences  are  partial  and  our  points  of  view  often 
very  partial.     To  admit  that,  in  the  richest  and  deepest  personal 
experiences,  man  knows  the  Highest  imperfectly  and  fragmen- 
tary, to  recognize  freely  that  one's  personal  experiences  of  the 
Divine  are  limited  and  colored  by  one's  own  individuality  and 
culture,  is  not  to  confess  them  illusory.     There  is  a  deep  but  daz- 
zling brightness  in  the  Highest,  in  the  Perfect.     We  may  see 


552  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

through  a  glass  darkly ;  but  even  so,  we  may  see.  Moreover,  since 
it  is  in  personal  life,  in  personal  spirit,  that  the  most  adequate 
embodiment  of  God  can  be  found,  if  anywhere;  and  since  no 
human  life  can  embody  the  whole  of  the  Godhead,  although  a 
human  life  might  embody  adequately  his  character  and  will 
towards  man  (as  Christians  believe  in  regard  to  Jesus)  the  ex- 
perience of  the  Divine  in  human  life  may,  while  adequate  in 
principle,  be  imperfect  and  growing. 

On  the  other  hand,  direct  experience  of  the  Divine  can  only 
be  a  value-experience,  an  experience  which  is  judged  to  carry  a 
positive  worth  for  the  spirit.  Its  divinity  must  reside  in  its  value, 
or  significance.  The  claim  to  a  direct  experience  of  any  value- 
reality  transcending  the  limits  of  human  nature,  cannot  be  allowed 
to  be  conclusive  in  the  court  of  philosophy.  It  can  be  admitted 
that  a  divine  significance  or  worth  inheres  in  the  contemplation 
of  the  starry  heavens,  in  the  enjoyment  of  beauty  and  sublimity 
in  nature,  in  the  tragedy  and  comedy  of  the  human  lot  and,  above 
all,  in  the  vision  and  appreciation  of  human  character,  of  love, 
friendship  and  utter  devotion.  But  this  is  an  immanent  divinity 
of  value.  At  best  it  bears  witness  to  the  degrees  of  worth  in 
which  an  immanent  spiritual  life  is  operative  within  the  limits 
of  human  experience.  Thus,  for  example,  to  speak  in  terms  of 
the  only  religion  of  which  I  have  any  first-hand  knowledge,  to  say 
that  God  is  experienced  through  Christ  could  mean  only  that  the 
highest  and  richest  values  of  the  spiritual  life  are  experienced 
in  the  Christocentric  life,  and  are  mediated  through  Christ. 

To  affirm  that  these  values  have  a  transcendent  cosmic  ground 
is  to  pass  beyond  the  limits  of  human  experience  by  an  act  of 
faith  which  has  its  source  in  the  feeling  of  supreme  value  which 
attaches  itself  to  the  Christian  experience.  One  may  believe  that 
these  spiritual  values  have  their  source  and  ground  in  the  tran- 
scendent and  self-existent  principle  of  things  (God  the  Father)  ; 
but  such  a  belief  transcends  the  limits  of  human  experience.  It 
is  not  hnoivledge  in  a  philosophical  or  scientific  sense. 

Furthermore  it  is,  intellectually,  a  confusion  to  argue  from  the 
experiential  immanence  of  those  higher  values  in  human  social 
life,  which  are  called  Divine  because  they  are  the  highest  values, 
that  any  historical  person  can  be  regarded  as  the  sole  source  of 
these  values  and  the  sole  original  and  continuing  medium  of  their 
revelation.     It  may  be  true,  for  example,  that  a  historical  person, 


METAPHYSICS  AND   RELIGION  553 

Jesus  of  Nazareth,  expressed  and  embodied  a  new  and  deeper  con- 
centration of  spiritual  values,  but  it  does  not  follow  that  the  his- 
torical Jesus  is  now  the  immanent  source  of  higher  values.  The 
Christ  of  present  value-experience  cannot  be  simply  the  restored 
figure  of  the  man  Jesus.  Only  the  immanent  spirit  of  God  in 
humanity  which  carries  forward  the  realization  and  experience 
of  spiritual  values  can  be  the  living  ground  of  the  present  experi- 
ence of  the  Highest.  It  is  perhaps  a  beneficent  illusion  that 
leads  religionists  to  believe  that,  in  realizing  a  new  and  deeper 
concentration  of  the  spiritual  life,  they  are  going  back  to  the 
historical  Jesus.     But  it  is  none  the  less  an  illusion. 

I  do  not  mean  that  the  attempt  to  determine  more  precisely 
the  historic  character  and  relationships  of  Jesus  is  not  eminently 
worth  while;  but  I  note  that  judgments  thereon,  the  interpreta- 
tions of  the  documents  and  the  person,  are  conditioned  by  the 
categories  of  the  interpreters'  world  view  or  metaphysics.  The 
historical  does  not  save  men ;  only  the  immanent  and  living  spirit 
saves  them.  This  conception  is  in  harmony  with  the  deepest  wis- 
dom of  the  New  Testament.  "It  is  expedient  for  you  that  I  go 
away ;  for  if  I  go  not  away  the  Comforter  will  not  come."  "But 
when  he  the  Comforter  is  come  he  will  lead  you  into  all  the  truth." 
"The  truth  shall  make  you  free."  "The  words  I  speak  unto  you 
are  spirit  and  truth."  "I  determined  not  to  know  Christ  after 
the  flesh." 

On  the  other  hand,  in  religion  and  morals,  as  indeed  in  all 
that  appertains  to  the  culture  of  the  human  spirit,  it  is  not  in  the 
passing  moment  of  civilization,  not  in  the  ever-fleeing  present, 
that  the  spirit  can  find  the  sufficing  materials  and  patterns  for 
its  nurture.  It  is  in  the  historical  or  time-spanning  realities  of 
cultural  systems,  of  objective  and  enduring  spiritual  structures, 
that  the  "spirit,"  as  something  much  more  concrete  and  rich  than 
a  mere  biological  self,  lives;  and  it  is  on  these  realities  that  the 
spirit  is  nourished.  The  spirit  comes  to  its  own  only  by  living 
within  what  Hegel  called  "Objective  Mind" ;  in  other  words,  by 
participation  in  the  continuing  though  changing  life  of  historical 
cultures — in  the  intellectual  structures  embodied  in  science  and 
philosophy;  in  the  ethical  structures  embodied  in  moral,  political 
and  other  social  institutions  (of  which  educational  institutions 
are  of  chief  importance)  ;  in  the  aesthetic  structures  embodied 
in  letters  and  the  fine  arts;  finally,  in  the  religious  structures 


554  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

embodied  in  the  whole  tradition  and  spirit  of  organized  religion. 
(It  is,  I  trust,  needless  to  say  that  these  culture  systems  are  not 
bits  of  a  mosaic  which  as  a  whole  constitutes  the  culture  of  an 
epoch ;  they  interfuse ;  the  culture  of  an  epoch  has  a  living  unity 
with  diverse  facets.) 

I  have  already  discussed  this  aspect  of  spiritual  life  more 
fully,  especially  in  Chapter  XXVIII.  It  may  suffice  to  say  here 
that,  when  I  say  that  historical  tradition  alone  is  an  insufficient 
ground  for  living  religion,  I  mean  that  the  historical  tradition 
must  be  assimilated,  relived  and  tested  by  present  conceptions  and 
needs  in  order  to  have  valid  meaning  and  to  prove  effective  now. 
Man,  as  a  spirit,  is  a  historical  being ;  he  spans  time ;  but  history 
must  make  good  with  the  living  by  lifting  his  spirit  above  the  din 
and  confusion  of  the  exiguous  present,  by  freeing  him  from  the 
"all-too-human"  of  the  parsing  moment ;  it  must  serve  as  the  lib- 
erator of  the  spirit,  not  its  shackler.  The  conservative  who  would 
bind  the  living  wholly  to  tradition  chokes  the  spirit  and  blocks 
progress ;  the  radical  who  would  throw  tradition  to  the  dogs  tries 
to  fly  in  a  vacuum.  The  liberal  is  he  who  uses  the  traditions  of 
the  elders  for  the  enrichment  and  expansion  of  the  living  present. 

So  it  is  in  religion.  To  be  more  specific:  The  members  of 
a  Christian  culture  cannot  live  fruitfully  and  fully,  if  unregardful 
of  their  great  traditions ;  nor  can  they  live  at  all  if  the  traditions 
become  iron  bonds ;  the  life  and  thought  of  the  founders  of  Chris- 
tianity continue  to  be  fountain-heads  of  faith  and  conduct,  in  so 
far  as  they  can  be  brought  into  a  harmonious  synthesis  with  the 
ethical  and  intellectual  and  aesthetic  interests  and  concepts  of  the 
living  present.  If  the  past  cannot  serve  the  needs  of  the  present 
it  is  dead  and  gone.  For  example,  the  validity  of  the  Christian 
view  of  life  and  the  world  can  no  longer  be  established  in  terms 
either  of  Greek  metaphysics  or  Mediaeval  cosmology  or  Roman 
law  and  feudal  polity.  The  Christian  view  must  come  to  terms 
with  the  science,  metaphysics,  social  psychology  and  ethics  of 
the  present  time;  otherwise  it  will  simply  cease  to  interest  in- 
telligent persons. 

In  brief,  the  claim  is  admissible  that  men  can  have  a  direct 
experience  of  the  Divine  in  the  sense  of  the  Highest  values,  if 
we  recognize  the  immanence  of  the  Supreme  Spirit  in  the  world 
and,  specifically,  in  human  life.  In  this  sense  we  may  say  that, 
while  the  over-self  must  be  superpersonal  in  that  he  must  tran- 


METAPHYSICS  AND  RELIGION  555 

scend  the  limitations  of  human  personality  and  oversocial  in  that 
he  must  transcend  the  limitations  of  human  society,  social  per- 
sonality must  have  its  ground  in  him.  It  is  much  less  untrue  to 
say  that  he  is  a  superpersonal  community  than  to  say  that  he  is 
merely  the  impersonal  spiritual  bond  of  human  society.  He  must 
transcend  and  include  whatever  is  of  worth  in  social  personality. 
It  is  not  within  the  province  of  a  treatise  on  general  meta- 
physics to  consider  in  detail  the  problems  of  the  philosophy  of 
religion.  What  I  have  written  above  I  have  done  with  the  intent 
to  indicate:  1.  The  points  of  contact  and  relation  between  meta- 
physics and  religion  and  the  logical  position  of  the  interpretation 
of  religion  in  terms  of  philosophy — what  used  to  be  called  natural 
theology.  For  the  latter  study,  in  the  proper  sense,  is  no  longer 
an  attempt  to  prove  the  existence  of  God  by  arguments  drawn  from 
the  evidences  of  design  in  nature;  as  philosophy  or  metaphysics 
of  religion  it  is  human  theology — the  enterprise  of  considering 
the  place  and  value  of  religion  as  an  experience  and  attitude  of 
universal  humanity.  2.  I  have  insisted  that  the  philosopher  must 
treat  the  facts  and  implications  of  religious  experience  with  the 
same  respect  that  he  accords  to  the  facts  and  principles  of  the 
physical  and  vital  orders,  if  he  is  to  construct  an  adequate  world 
view.  Religious  experience  in  the  individual  and  religion  as  a 
form  of  social  culture  are  both  interwoven  with  arts  and  morals, 
economics  and  politics ;  in  short  with  the  whole  social  order.  The 
philosophy  of  religion  is  not  merely  a  part  of,  it  is,  in  a  sense,  the 
culmination  of  the  philosophy  of  culture. 

III.  The  Meaning  of  Faith 

Faith,  in  its  general  sense,  includes  two  psychical  factors: 
(1)  The  sentiment  or  affective-volitional  attitude  of  trust  or  con- 
fidence; (2)  the  ideational  attitude  which  supplies  the  content, 
the  image  or  concept,  of  the  object  of  faith.  One  cannot  believe 
without  having  some  idea  of  that  in  which  he  believes. 

Faith  is  the  attitude  of  personal  trust  or  confidence.  "Faith  is 
akin  to  faithfulness  and  implies  faithfulness  in  the  object."  4 
One  is  willing  to  act  or  to  repose  if  one  has  faith;  one  is  ready 
to  risk  one's  personal  fortunes  on  the  venture  of  faith.  Loyalty, 
obedience,  trustfulness  are  different  nuances  of  the  faith-attitude. 


4  Hoffding,  Philosophy  of  Religion,  p.  117. 


556  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

A  faith  is  a  strongly  held  belief — a  belief  on  which  one  will  stake 
something  valuable.  Faith  is  always  directed  towards  the  future. 
It  is  the  strong  presumption  that  conditions  which  now  obtain 
(although  one  does  not  fully  see  them)  will  issue  in  results  favor- 
able to  values  or  interests  in  which  one  has  a  stake.  Thus  faith 
is  dynamic,  forward  looking.  In  a  wholly  static  universe  there 
would  be  no  occasion  for  faith.  Faith  is  indeed  the  conscious 
form  of  the  vital  impetus  (L'elan  vital). 

Faith  and  hope  are  closely  related.  A  strong  hope  or  expecta- 
tion is  a  faith.  A  weak  faith  means  a  vacillating  hope;  but  the 
chief  distinction  between  faith  and  hope  is  that  faith  is  a  voli- 
tional or  active  attitude  of  a  person,  whereas  hope  need  not  in- 
volve any  active  volitional  attitude.  I  may  hope  that  a  certain 
thing  will  come  to  pass  and  yet  doubt,  whereas,  if  I  have  faith 
my  doubts  are  at  or  near  the  vanishing  point  and  I  am  ready  to 
act.  Of  course,  one  may  act  without  hope  or  as  a  "forlorn  hope" ; 
and  so  without  faith. 

Faith  is  a  nearly  constant  condition  of  human  action.  Every 
day  we  go  about  our  business  with  faith  in  the  institutions  of  our 
country,  in  our  friends  and  colleagues,  in  our  families,  in  our 
own  powers,  and  in  the  order  of  nature.  Faith  in  the  possibilities 
of  human  nature  is  the  presumption  upon  which  most  workers 
for  the  good  of  humankind  proceed.  We  live  forwards  and  we 
must  always  proceed  upon  the  assumption,  at  least,  that  things 
can  be  made  better.  The  complete  loss  of  faith  would  paralyze 
action.  Even  the  most  critical  scientist,  scholar  or  philosopher 
works  upon  the  assumption  that  there  is  a  true  or  intelligible 
order  of  things  which  can  be  discovered  by  patient  effort ;  the 
artist  has  faith  in  the  value  of  beauty ;  the  good  man  has  faith  in 
the  supreme  power  of  integrity  and  justice.  Without  faith  human 
life  suffers  from  creeping  paralysis.  Indeed,  faith  is  essentially 
a  moral  act,  an  expression  of  the  essential  will;  it  is  the  deep 
of  the  believer's  ethical  character  calling  to  the  deep  of  a  postu- 
lated kindred  character,  the  affirmation  of  the  spiritual  quality 
of  the  self. 

Faith  is  always  personal  or  quasi-personal  in  reference.  Even 
faith  in  beauty,  in  abstract  truth,  or  in  the  order  of  nature, 
implies  that  these  things  further  human  values.  Faith  in  God 
is  trust  in  the  good  will  towards  personal  life  of  the  highest 
reality. 


METAPHYSICS  AND  RELIGION  557 

Faith  is  frequently  set  up  as  antithetical  to  knowledge  or 
sight.  And  it  is  true  that  where  we  have  certain  knowledge,  as 
that  2  +  2  =  4,  we  do  not  require  faith.  Faith,  I  have  said,  is 
directed  towards  the  future  and  implies  that  its  objective  will  be 
realized — that  the  present  unknown  conditions  of  its  realization 
are  nevertheless  effectively  real.  But  faith  is  not  blind,  except 
when  the  faithful  is  blinded  by  passion.  A  man  may  have  faith 
in  a  worthless  woman  or  friend,  because  blinded  by  affection.  But 
a  reasonable  faith  is  based  on  a  combination  of  probability  and 
interest.  I  have  faith  in  my  friend,  because  he  has  proved  him- 
self my  friend;  in  the  order  of  nature,  because  it  has  stood  thus 
far;  faith  in  my  country,  because  of  its  achievements  and  prom- 
ises; faith  in  myself,  because  of  my  knowledge  of  my  powers; 
faith  in  all  these  things,  because  I  need  them  in  the  business  of 
living.  Thus,  faith  is  an  anticipation  or  forecast  of  fuller  knowl- 
edge, based  on  the  union  in  various  degrees  of  partial  knowledge 
and  human  need.  Faith  is  compacted  by  productive  imagination 
out  of  experienced  fact  and  its  interpretation  quickened  by 
interest. 

I  will  conclude  with  a  brief  indication  of  the  interrelation- 
ships of  personal  valuation  and  religious  faith.  Faith  in  God  is 
the  global  or  integral  presupposition  or  postulate  of  the  attain- 
ability of  true  goods  by  the  spirit.  Faith  is  the  expression  of 
man's  growing  and  dynamic  spirit.  If  the  world  were  utterly 
unintelligible  or  indifferent  to  man  faith  would  be  wholly  an  il- 
lusion and  science  and  practical  cultural  progress  delusions. 
Faith  in  God  is  simply  the  completion,  the  rounding  out,  of  all 
lesser  or  partial  faiths.  I  may  remark  that  the  scientific  attitude 
implies  a  reverence  for  fact,  for  truth,  that  is  in  quality  not  dif- 
ferent from  religious  reverence.  Faith  in  God  may  be  based  on 
several  or  all  of  the  following  grounds: 

1.  The  well-nigh  universal  tendency  in  mankind  to  believe 
in  a  supreme  power  or  powers,  "the  determiner  of  destiny,"  as 
Mr.  J.  B.  Pratt  puts  it.  In  view  of  the  illusory  beliefs  that  have 
been  universally  held  this  motive  alone  will  not  weigh  heavily 
with  intelligent  persons. 

2.  The  continuous  and  widespread  existence  and  influence  of 
religious  institutions  as  factors  in  culture.  This  proves  no  more 
than  that  organized  religion  and  the  beliefs  on  which  it  is  based 
have  been  important  factors  in  every  civilization  thus  far. 


558  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

3.  The  fact  that  those  who  conspicuously  have  had  faith  in 
God  seem  to  have  received  thereby  unity,  peace  and  strength  of 
mind  and  to  have  been  enabled  to  live  vigorously  and  happily. 
This  is  the  pragmatic  argument  from  the  fruits  of  belief.  Against 
it  may  be  set  forth  the  evil  fruits  of  superstition  and  fanaticism 
and  the  fact  that  some  persons  have  lived  vigorously  and  happily 
without  belief  in  a  God. 

4.  The  reasonable  appeal  of  the  teachings  and  personalities 
of  prophets  and  revealers.  This  ground  is  relative  to  the  individ- 
uality and  culture  of  the  recipient.  Its  real  strength  depends  on 
its  harmony  with  the  next  two  grounds. 

5.  The  synoptic  consideration  of  the  order  of  nature  and  of 
human  life,  when  this  leads  to  the  conclusion  that  it  is  reasonable 
to  believe  in  a  Supreme  Cosmic  Order  that  makes  for  goodness 
(in  the  inclusive  sense  of  all  values). 

6.  Personal  experience  of  the  harmonizing  and  strength-giving 
power  of  faith — immediate  experience  of  the  Divine.  This  is 
sufficient  for  him  who  has  it.     I  may  add  that  only  the  fifth  and 

*  sixth  grounds  seem  to  me  really  convincing  to  a  thinking  person. 
Of  course,  if,  on  these  latter  grounds,  one  is  convinced  of  the 
reasonableness  and  value  of  faith  in  God,  the  other  grounds  rein- 
force his  faith.    And  they  play  into  one  another. 

The  problem  of  the  place  of  values  in  reality  is  the  taproot  of 
religion.5  "The  feeling  which  is  determined  by  the  fate  of  values 
in  the  struggle  for  existence  is  the  religious  feeling.  It  is  de- 
termined, then,  by  the  relation  of  values  to  reality.  This  relation, 
as  it  manifests  itself  to  men,  determines  the  value  which  they 
assign  to  existence.  Religious  judgments,  therefore,  are  second- 
ary judgments  of  value;  in  comparison  with  the  primary  judg- 
ments of  value  in  which  the  first  two  groups  of  values  find  ex- 
pression they  are  derivative.6  The  two  other  groups  are  (1)  the 
values  connected  with  self-assertion;  and  (2)  the  values  connected 
with  the  service  of  transindividual  interests,  such  as  the  ethical, 
aesthetic  and  intellectual  life.  Hoffding  calls  the  religious  feeling 
cosmic  vital  feeling.  I  call  it  cosmopersonal  feeling,  since  I  hold 
that  it  always  involves  the  place  of  personality  in  the  cosmos. 

6  Cf.  the  very  fine  discussion  of  the  psychology  of  religious  experience  and 
faith  in  Hoffding 's  Philosophy  of  Religion,  especially  Part  iii,  ' '  Psychological 
Philosophy  of  Eeligion. " 

•Hoffding,  op.  cit.,  p.  107. 


METAPHYSICS  AND  RELIGION  559 

Hoffding  conceives  the  fundamental  essence  of  religion  to  be  faith 
in  the  conservation  of  values;  but,  since  all  values  have  actual 
being  only  in  persons,  the  conservation  of  values  means  the  con- 
servation of  personal  spirit.  How  can  values  be  conserved  or 
enhanced,  if  the  actuality  in  which  alone  value  lives  be  not  con- 
served or  enhanced?  /  would  say,  then,  that  the  feeling  which 
is  determined  by  man's  fundamental  convictions  as  to  the  place 
of  personality  in  the  cosmos  is  the  religious  feeling,  and  religious 
faith  is  the  act  of  trust  of  confidence  that  the  universal  order  will 
conserve  and  further  the  life  of  personal  spirits.  Anything  less 
than  this  is  an  emasculation  of  religion. 

There  is  involved  in  the  question  of  the  progress  and  continu- 
ance of  rational  spirit  in  individual  form,  in  other  words,  of  per- 
sonality in  the  universe,  the  fate  of  all  the  cherished  creations, 
discoveries  and  evaluations  of  the  human  mind — of  truth  in  sci- 
ence, of  beauty  in  the  enjoyment  of  nature  and  art  and  of  beauty, 
harmony,  integrity  and  justice  in  human  life. 

No  thinking  person  can  be  indifferent  to  the  religious  problem, 
since  with  it  are  tied  up  all  other  spiritual  issues.  Indeed,  the 
seeming  indifference  or  even  active  hostility  of  many  persons  to 
religion  is  due  rather  to  the  failure  of  conventional  religion  to 
find  a  home  and  sustenance  for  the  higher  spiritual  values.  A 
religious  faith  that  does  not  find  welcome  for  all  beauty  and  that 
is  not  open  to  the  spirit  of  free  science  is  the  foe  of  human  prog- 
ress and  sins  against  the  spirit  of  religion.  When  the  gods  arrive 
the  half-gods  must  go.  Genuine  religion  involves  faith  in  the 
existence  and  accessibility,  through  worship,  of  a  value-reality  that 
transcends  the  facts  of  external  nature  and  of  purely  immanent 
human  culture.  The  attitude  of  worship  or  devotion  is  the  reli- 
gious attitude  in  its  fullness.  Its  object  is  the  transcendent  inter- 
fusion of  reality  and  value.  Faith  asserts  the  reality  and  su- 
premacy of  the  Highest — the  perfectly  Holy — as  the  fulfillment 
of  what  is  aimed  at  in  the  highest  spiritual  value-attitudes  of 
personality. 

What  is  the  Holiest?    That  in  which  now  and  always  the  Spirits, 
Ever  more  deeply  feel,  are  ever  more  fully  at  one. 

— Goethe. 

God,  the  object  of  faith  and  worship,  transcends  and  includes, 
in  his  concrete  livingness,  the  true,  the  beautiful  and  the  good, 


560  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

which  are  partially  glimpsed,  served  and  enjoyed  by  personal 
spirits.  Eeligious  faith  is  strong  only  where  man  has  a  strong 
sense  of  the  value  of  the  personal  spirit  as  supreme  over  imper- 
sonal things  and  forces.  No  one  can  worship  force  or  life  without 
personalizing  them. 

Faith  is  not  a  mere  act  of  will.  It  is  the  supreme  expression 
of  man's  entire  personality.     It  is  implied  in  all  vigorous  willing. 

There  are,  as  Hoffding  points  out,  with  fine  understanding, 
certain  broad  types  of  faith,  as  well  as  minor  individual  nuances. 
These  broad  types  conform  to  the  prevalent  need  of  interest. 
They  correspond  to  temperamental  differences  in  persons  and  also 
to  secular  changes  in  the  spiritual  climates  of  human  civilization. 
The  chief  of  these  types  seem  to  be: 

1.  Faith  in  an  attainable  perfect  peace;  satisfying  the  need 
for  deliverance  from  the  "slings  and  arrows  of  outrageous  for- 
tune," of  escape  from  the  turmoil,  the  wretchedness  and  empti- 
ness of  the  world — world-fleeing  faith.  "Come  unto  me  all  ye 
that  are  weary  and  heavy-laden  and  I  will  give  you  rest."  Ex- 
tinction of  desire,  the  abnegation  of  individuality  in  Christian, 
Vedantic  and  Buddhistic  mysticism  and  monasticism  are  good 
examples  of  this  type. 

2.  Faith  in  the  opportunity  for  self-development  or  self-real- 
ization, for  the  unfolding  and  exercise  of  one's  powers.  "I  am 
come  that  ye  might  have  life  and  have  it  more  abundantly."  This 
is  the  highest  Greek  ideal,  as  expressed  partially  in  Plato  and 
more  fully  in  Aristotle.  It  is  the  prevailing  ideal  in  modern 
ethics — in  Shaftesbury,  Joseph  Butler,  Goethe,  Schleiermacher, 
T.  H.  Green,  F.  H.  Bradley.  Hoffding  puts  "confident  boldness" 
as  a  distinct  type  and  cites  Luther's  expression  thereof — "God  is 
that  whereat  a  man  may  provide  himself  with  all  good  and  find 
a  refuge  in  all  need;  to  have  a  god  therefore  is  nothing  else  but 
to  believe  in  him  and  to  trust  him  from  the  heart."  This  is 
scarcely  a  distinct  type  of  faith,  it  is  rather  the  expression  of  a 
vigorous  faith. 

3.  Faith  as  the  satisfaction  of  the  desire  for  aesthetic  and 
contemplative  union  with  the  universe.  This  is  peculiarly  the 
type  of  faith  which  appeals  to  reflective  and  contemplative  na- 
tures— to  philosophers,  especially  speculative  mystics,  and  to 
philosophical  poets.  It  is  found  among  speculative  thinkers  in 
all   cultures— in    the   Upanishads,    in   Plato,    Plotinus,    in   the 


METAPHYSICS  AND  RELIGION  561 

Mediaeval  mystics  and  scholastic  philosophers,  in  J.  Boehme,  in 
Spinoza,  Novalis,  Fichte,  Hegel,  Wordsworth,  Tennyson,  Emer- 
son and  Walt  Whitman. 

Taken  by  itself  each  of  these  types  is  one-sided.  In  the  uni- 
versal religion  place  must  be  found  for  them  all;  for  all  are 
phases  in  the  life  of  personality ;  the  attainment  of  inner  harmony 
and  peace  is  a  condition  of  self-realization,  and  union  with  the 
universal  order  is  a  part  of  it.  But  the  most  inclusive  conception 
is  the  fulfillment  of  personality,  for  in  this  is  included  both  action 
and  contemplation,  both  peace  and  striving,  both  self-denial  and 
self-assertion;  for  it  is  the  realization  of  spiritual  individuality 
in  the  service  and  enjoyment  by  the  unique  self  of  the  lasting 
values  of  life.  The  universal  religion  is  faith  in  the  enduring 
reality  of  personal  spirit;  the  doctrine  of  the  value-content  of 
personality  belongs  to  ethics,  the  comprehensive  theory  of  values. 
Religion  is  faith  in  the  cosmical  status  of  personality.  The  norms 
of  religion  are  ethical;  in  plain  words,  the  value  of  a  religious 
faith  is  tested  by  the  adequacy  of  its  ideal  of  personality. 

In  conclusion,  if  we  seem  to  have  reduced  religion  to  a  merely 
human  process,  so  that  religion  appears  to  be  only  the  psychical 
reaction  of  leading  individuals,  and  of  social  groups  who  follow 
their  lead,  to  the  tangled  mass  of  human  experiences,  let  it  be 
remembered  that  the  only  sort  of  objectivity  that  will  stand  the 
test  of  philosophical  criticism  is  the  objectivity  of  a  universal 
reason,  universal  moral  nature  and  a  universal  spiritual  insight 
and  faith,  working  themselves  out  through  the  endless  wealth  of 
human  individualities  and  cultural  groups.  The  devotees  of 
special  sciences  are  apt  to  fall  into  the  naively  realistic  attitude 
that  they  are  dealing  with  things  in  themselves  and  eliminating 
human  reactions.  One  principal  use  of  philosophy  is  to  remind 
the  man  in  the  street  and  the  scientific  dogmatist  that  every 
theory,  every  dogma,  in  science,  social  polity,  and  religion,  is 
anthropomorphic.  Human  thought  and  conduct  have  concern 
only  with  a  world  of  human  experience.  Philosophy  delivers  us 
from  our  individual  caves,  from  the  idols  of  the  market-place  and 
the  forum,  it  delivers  us  from  petty  idiosyncrasies,  from  class  and 
group  provincialism,  by  delivering  us  into  deeper  understanding 
of  and  sympathy  with  the  universally  human. 


562  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 


POSTSCRIPT 

The  doctrine  of  personality  developed  in  the  foregoing  work  im- 
plies a  social  philosophy  whose  guiding  principle  is  that  personality 
is  developed  through  the  active  and  free  participation  of  the  self  in 
the  life  of  the  objective  spirit,  which  is  embodied  in  social  institutions 
or  culture  systems — economic,  civic,  educational,  scientific,  aesthetic 
and  religious — directed  towards  the  cultivation  of  personality.  I 
hope  to  present  some  applications  of  this  doctrine  in  a  volume  of 
essays  on  social  philosophy. 

In  the  meantime  I  venture  to  say  that  the  fundamental  problem 
of  West-European  and  American  society  to-day  is  the  readjustment 
of  mechanistic  industrialism  and  democracy  to  the  native  and  inex- 
pugnable craving  of  man  for  personality.  In  every  department  of 
our  social  life  the  pressure  of  mechanism  on  personality  increases. 
Emerson  would  be  appalled  at  the  extent  to  which  his  words :  "Things 
are  in  the  saddle  and  ride  mankind"  have  become  a  literal  statement 
of  the  plight  of  our  civilization.  "Getting  and  spending  we  lay  waste 
our  powers."  The  marvelous  progress,  during  the  past  hundred 
years,  of  mechanical  science  and  industry,  should  have  freed  man's 
spiritual  energies  for  a  much  more  extensive  and  intensive  cultiva- 
tion of  fine  living.  One  might  have  expected  a  widespread  cultivation 
of  liberal  imagination  and  spiritual  feeling;  flowering  in  a  finer 
and  freer  fellowship  of  noble  minds  quickened  to  a  more  lively  ap- 
preciation and  enjoyment  of  nature,  art,  letters,  science  and  philos- 
ophy, in  a  life  of  urbane  social  intercourse. 

Instead  of  all  this  machines  have  enthralled  the  western  mind. 
The  two  general  obsessions  seem  to  be  the  enjoyment  of  rapid  motion 
nowhither,  and  the  possession  of  more  means  of  material  comfort. 
Western  man  has  developed  machinery  to  do  his  bidding,  but  he 
tends  to  become  the  slave  of  his  own  machines  and  of  his  own  body 
and  its  animal  appetites,  which  are  the  only  parts  of  him  that  mere 
machinery  will  serve.  Everything  fine  in  our  industrial  democracy 
is  being  endangered  by  mass  impulses,  mass  appetites,  mass  imagery 
and  quantity  production  to  feed  the  mediocre  mass  soul.  The  stand- 
ards of  education,  thought,  scholarship,  taste,  and  character  are  low. 
In  fact  it  can  scarcely  be  said  that  any  standards  obtain  general  rec- 
ognition. There  is  little  reverence  for  the  past  or  for  the  finer  things 
in  life;  there  is  widespread  lack  of  moral  courage,  of  mental  sanity 
and  rational  self-control,  of  self-reliant  spiritual  character.  We  may 
be  going  fast  towards  a  thoroughly  mechanistic  barbarism,  varied  by 
anarchical  outbursts  of  primitive  impulses. 

It  is  common  to  lay  our  present  troubles  to  the  Great  War.    The 


METAPHYSICS  AND  RELIGION  563 

War  cured  no  social  ill,  except,  perhaps,  overweening  militarism  and 
imperialism!  On  the  other  hand,  the  War  was  the  outbreak  of  a 
malignant  growth  that  had  been  long  developing  within  the  body  of 
western  civilization.  It  exaggerated  the  ills  of  prewar  civilization — 
material  repletion  with  spiritual  emptiness,  neuroticism,  perverted 
eroticism,  practical  materialism,  social  conflict  breeding  an  irrational 
radicalism  and  an  equally  irrational  reactionism,  the  vulgarization 
of  life. 

The  widespread  irrationalism,  the  cult  of  crude  impulse,  the  proc- 
lamation of  a  raw  and  sensuous  egotism,  the  bitter  illusionism  and 
skepticism  of  our  younger  so-called  "realists"  in  literature  as  to  the 
possibility  of  any  worthy  and  satisfactory  values  in  life,  the  loss 
of  any  guiding  ideals  of  conduct,  and  the  decay  of  religion  as  a 
form  of  social  control,  coupled  with  the  widespread  hunger  for  a 
new  religion — all  these  things  are  symptoms  of  the  more  or  less 
blind  reaction  and  craving  of  the  human  soul  in  the  face  of  the  ad- 
vancing tide  of  practical  and  theoretical  materialism.  There  is  that 
in  man  which  must  and  does  revolt  against  his  being  treated  as  a 
mobile  self-feeding  and  self-propagating  machine. 

I  am  in  hearty  sympathy  with  every  desire  and  effort  of  men  for 
finer,  richer  and  more  harmonious  lives.  I  am  in  opposition  to  the 
superstitions  of  materialistic  industrialism  and  crude  egalitarian 
democracy.  A  finer  civilization,  a  richer  and  happier  life  for  man, 
will  not  be  brought  to  pass  merely  by  increase  of  material  production, 
by  industrialism  alone;  even  though  the  distribution  of  the  product 
be  more  nearly  equalized  through  mass  control;  indeed,  if  these  su- 
perstitions continue  to  grow  our  civilization  will  go  to  smash.  The 
"stand-pat"  capitalist  and  the  materialistic  socialist  or  radical  are 
in  the  same  boat,  spiritually.  Their  standards  of  life  are  the  same. 
It  is,  between  them,  merely  a  question  of  whether  the  big  animals 
who  have  been  ruling  the  herd  shall  have  most  of  the  provender,  or 
whether  the  little  animals  shall  have  what  has  hitherto  been  the  lion's 
share. 

What  the  western  world  needs  is  that  (without  the  recrudescence 
of  hereditary  class-culture),  the  principle  of  spiritual  aristocracy,  or 
the  leadership  of  the  finer  values  of  reasonableness — self-discipline, 
cultivated  imagination  and  devotion  to  the  things  of  the  spirit — shall 
be  recognized  as  the  standard  and  guide.  Western  society  must,  if 
it  is  to  be  saved,  gladly  follow  the  leadership  of  those  who  are  dedi- 
cated to  the  service  of  the  higher  values.  Only  a  fuller  development 
and  application  of  the  ethical  and  other  spiritual  insights  of  the  creative 
mind,  to  education  and  social  administration,  can  bring  healing 
to  the  nations.    We  need,  in  addition  to  the  application  of  the  prin- 


564  MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS 

ciples  of  a  liberal  and  humane  ethics,  a  simpler  and  more  universal 
religion  of  the  spirit,  a  religion  freed  from  the  encumbering  baggage 
of  discredited  cosmologies  and  dualistic  ethics.7  I  have  not  referred 
to  the  thought  of  India  or  China  in  this  connection,  because  it  is 
not  clear  to  me  whether  these  forms  of  spiritual  culture  have  any 
important  positive  contributions  to  make  to  our  spiritual  life.  But 
India  and  China  at  least  furnish  great  examples  of  how  a  rich  life 
may  be  lived  without  the  material  comforts  and  industrial  madness 
of  the  west. 

Probably  the  present  disillusionment  at  the  failures  of  industrialism 
and  democracy  is,  in  part,  the  effect  of  the  collapse  of  the  too  high- 
pitched  hopes  of  the  nineteeth  century.  Perhaps  the  relative  amount 
and  power  of  creative  and  directive  thought  in  Western  civilization 
is  as  great  as,  or  even  greater  than,  in  any  previous  time.  To  over- 
praise the  past  and  to  depreciate  unduly  the  present  is  a  fallacy  to 
which  the  middle-aged  and  the  old  are  always  prone. 

Over  against  the  diseases  of  Western  industrialism  can  be  set,  as 
grounds  for  optimism,  the  increasing  interest  in  education,  notably 
in  the  liberal  education  of  adults  as  well  as  of  youth,  the  vigorous 
activity  in  all  lines  of  intellectual  enquiry  and  the  spread  of  the 
scientific  temper  of  mind;  finally,  the  earnestness  with  which  tradi- 
tional forms  of  moral  and  legal  custom,  as  well  as  the  forms  and 
methods  of  traditional  religion,  are  being  challenged  and  subjected  to 
a  penetrating  scrutiny. 

Western  society  stands  on  the  threshold  of  a  new  epoch;  it  is  the 
more  necessary  to  insist  that  only  through  a  substanial  increase  in 
the  proportion  of  well-balanced  individuals,  combining  stability  of 
character  with  well-furnished,  open  and  searching  intellects,  can  the 
new  epoch  become  a  glorious  one  in  the  record  of  humanity.  Social 
machinery,  however  cunningly  elaborated,  is  not  only  worthless;  it 
is  a  positive  hindrance  to  the  best  life,  unless  it  be  subordinated  to 
the  development  of  spiritual  individuals.  The  paramount  duty  of 
the  present  and  the  great  hope  for  the  future  lies  in  the  education 
of  the  individual. 

T I  may  refer  to  two  articles  of  mine — ' '  Democracy  and  Intellectual  Dis- 
tinction" in  School  and  Society,  Vol.  v  (1917)  pp.  421-430,  and  "The  Functions 
of  the  Faculty  in  the  Administration  of  a  University"  in  the  same  journal, 
Vol.  xii  (1920),  pp.  449-458,  reprinted  in  the  volume  Educational  Problems  in 
College  and  University  published  by  the  University  of  Michigan;  also  "Phil- 
osophy and  the  Crisis  in  Civilization, ' '  in  The  Field  of  PMlosophy,  3rd  edition. 


INDEX 


Absolute,  the,  139,  478,  479,  527. 

Absolutes,  the  pluralistic  world  of 
tiny,  158. 

Act,  mental,  17ff.,  310. 

Activity,  the  knowledge  of,  203-205. 

Adams,  G.  P.,  383. 

Aesthetic  feeling,  437,  438,  441,  442. 

Aesthetic  values,  400,  401-402,  403, 
410,  430-433,  435-437;  and  cog- 
nition, 439,  440,  441,  444;  and 
morality,  440,  441,  443,  444. 

Aesthetic  view  of  nature,  486,  487. 

Aesthetics,  2,  9. 

Ahrimanes,  526. 

Ahura-mazda,  526. 

Alcheringa  myth,  220. 

Alexander,  S.,  97;  on  categories,  134, 
140,  152,  182,  223,  228,  229,  230, 
235-237;  theory  of  space  and  time, 
235-237,  258,  263,  469. 

Analysis,  6. 

Ancient  Christianity,  545. 

Animatism  or  animism,  181. 

Anaxagoras,  184ff. 

Anschauung,  die  intellectuelle,  79. 

Antigone  of  Sophocles,  417,  439. 

Appearance  and  reality,  98-109; 
Bradley's  doctrine  of,  100-103. 

Aristotle,  1,  185,  265,  284,  407,  410, 
418,  540,  560. 

Aspects,  percepts  as,  245-247. 

Atomism  and  atomists,  185,  186; 
Humian,  76. 

Atomism,  logical,  151. 

Attitude,  mental,  18,  310. 

Augustine,  St.,  305,  539,  549. 


Automatisms,  336,  344,  345. 
Avenarius,  R.,  14,  85,  192,  323. 
Axiological  order,  167;    eternity  or 

permanence,  516. 
Axiology,  1. 

Baillie,  J.  B.,  329. 

Baldwin,  J.  M.,  85. 

Beauchamp,  the  case  of  Miss,  348- 

351. 
Beauty,  208;    truth  and  goodness, 

434^44,  445-447. 
Behavior  as  basis  of  knowing,  85ff . 
Behaviorism  in  psychology,  99,  295, 

296;    moderate  behaviorism  and 

consciousness,  327-329. 
Being,  30,  155,  184ff.;  existent,  155, 

subsistent,  155. 
Belief ,  26ff . 
Benevolence,  415. 
Bergson,  H.,  7,  44,  45,  72,  78ff.,   82, 

144,  147,  177,  186,  217,  242,  248, 

258,  265,  274,  276,  282,  372,  373, 

456,  461,  483. 
Berkeley,  68,  69,  70,  154,  188,  196, 

197,  227,  365. 
Binet,  A.,  348. 
Bode,  B.,  327,  328. 
Body  as  dynamic  system,  369,  370. 
Boehme,  J.,  492,  561. 
Bosanquet,  B.,  13,  20,  26,  29,  52,  53, 

106,  154,  186,  207;    quoted,  209, 

210,  211;  329,  353,  382,  407,  418, 

499. 
Boscovich,  242. 
Bradley,  A.  C,  438. 


565 


566 


INDEX 


Bradley,  F.  H.,  3,  26,  29,  40,  52,  72, 
73,  77,  100-103,  106,  124,  140, 
154,  158,  182,  186,  196,  205,  207, 
217,  224,  312,  314,  327,  329,  353, 
407, 418, 433,  473,  560. 

Brentano,  F.,  13,  26,  298. 

Browning,  R.,  408,  492,  532 

Bruno,  G.,  248,  378. 

Buddha,  389.    See  also  Gotama. 

Buddhism,  389,  509,  518. 

Buddhistic  mysticism,  560. 

Butler,  Jos.,  560. 

Byron,  quoted,  437. 

Caird,  E.,  154. 

Caird,  J.,  500. 

Calkins,  M.  W.,  154,  248ff.,  294,  295. 

Calvin,  J.,  549. 

Cantor,  G.,  145. 

Carlyle,  T.,  58. 

Carr,  H.  W.,  216,  225. 

Cassirer,  E.,  187,  216. 

Categorialness,  62. 

Categories,  the  system  of,  133-212. 

Categories,  what  are?  38ff.,  133-136; 
Alexander  on/134;  Hegel  on,  134ff . ; 
Kant  on,  134ff. 

Catholic  Christianity,  519. 

Causal  order,  33ff.,  165. 

Causality,  37ff.;  and  novelty,  198- 
201;  and  purpose,  202,  203;  and 
the  problem  of  singularism  and 
pluralism,  196-197;  change  and, 
191-205. 

Causation  and  power  or  agency,  193- 
197;  totality,  201-205;  conti- 
nuity, 199-201;  mechanical  and 
final,  191ff.;    uniformity,  197-199. 

Causes,  plurality  of,  197. 

Chandler,  A.  R.,  19,  139. 

Change,  and  causality,  191-205. 

Chaos,  153,  282. 

Characteristic,  the,  in  expression, 
438,  439. 


Christ,  552,  553.    See  also  Jesus. 

Christian  Church,  416. 

Christian  culture,  554. 

Christian  experience,  552;  view  of 
life,  554. 

Christian  mysticism,  560. 

Christian  scientists,  532. 

Christianity,  389,  526,  530,  554. 

Christocentric,  552. 

Clarke,  Samuel,  216. 

Clifford,  W.  K.,  261. 

Co-conscious,  the,  336,  339. 

Coherence  theory  of  truth,  52-55, 
64-67. 

Comforter,  the,  553. 

Community,  and  personality,  207, 
209;  God  or  Overself  as  ground  of , 
495-500. 

Complexes  and  relations,  40. 

Comprehensiveness,  as  criterion  of 
truth,  63. 

Concepts,  and  percepts,  44-48;  as 
dynamic,  46ff. 

Confucius,  389. 

Consciousness,  315-333;  and  experi- 
ence, 315;  and  its  objects,  317-329; 
and  moderate  behaviorism,  327- 
329;  and  negativity  329-333; 
as  a  neutral  continuum,  319-320; 
and  neutral  Monism,  324-327;  and 
"  pure  experience,"  321-324;  de- 
scription of,  315;  dialectic  of,  329- 
333;  idealistic  theory  of,  329-333; 
in  general  or  pure,  14ff . ;  relational 
theory  of,  317-319; 

Conservation  of  energy,  257,  269- 
271,  356,  357. 

Consistency,  62.    See  also  Coherence. 

Continuity,  35,  36;  and  causation, 
199-201;  and  discreteness,  145, 
170ff. 

Continuum,  consciousness  as  a,  319, 
320. 

Cope,  E.  D.,  265. 


INDEX 


567 


Copernicus,  389. 

Cosmos,  153,  161,  477,  494. 

Courage,  415. 

Couturat,  L.,  142,  481. 

Creationism,  as  theory  of  the  origin 

of  the  soul,  378,  379,  380. 
Creative  advance,  nature  as,  223. 
Creativeness,  198-201,  202,  203. 
Creative  process,  264-266. 
Creative  synthesis,  265,  381,  455. 
Creighton,  J.  E.,  viii. 
Cultural  order  and  personality,  383- 

393. 
Culture  and  philosophy,  7,  21,  297, 

312,  330-333,  382-393,  404,  405, 

415-423,   503-507,   538-540,  553, 

554;  562-564.    • 
Culture,  present  problems  of  western, 

562-564. 
Culture  systems,  383-392. 

Dante,  175. 

Darwin,  C,  389. 

Darwinian  theory,  71,  273. 

Dedekind,  R.,  145,  483. 

Descartes,  8,  82,  112,  185,  197,  308, 
387. 

Determinism.    See  Freedom. 

Deutero-Isaiah,  532,  549. 

Development,  and  novelty,  170ff., 
197-203. 

Devil.    See  Satan  and  Ahrimanes. 

Dewey,  John,  59,  108,  293. 

Dialectic,  method,  7ff.,  77,  100ff.; 
as  valid  principle,  121, 125, 126;  of 
conscious  life  as  a  whole,  329-333; 
See  also  Negation  and  Negativity. 

Differential  psychology,  294. 

Dilthey,  W.,  294. 

Discreteness,  and  continuity,  35, 
36,  145;  in  development  and  evo- 
lution, 170ff. 

Dispositions,  neuropsychical  or  psy- 
chophysical, 308,  337.  338.  340. 


Diversity,  33,  35. 

Divine,  the,  540,  551,  552,  554.  See 
also  God,  the  Overself,  the  Cosmic 
Ground  of  Values,  the  Supreme 
Spirit,  the  Supreme  Spiritual  Com- 
munity, Super-person,  the  Univer- 
sal Order,  the  Trinity. 

Divine  Comedy  of  Dante,  443. 

Double-aspect  theory,  185.  See  also 
Psychophysical  parallelism. 

Drake,  D.,  94. 

Dreams,  and  the  libido,  338. 

Driesch,  H.,  43,  254,  255. 

Dualism,  epistemological,  72. 

Dualism  in  mind-body  relation,  355- 
359. 

Duality  in  knowledge,  55. 

Duration  and  time,  230,  231. 

Duties,  415. 

Ego,  15ff.,  290,  323.  See  also  Indi- 
vidual, Individuality,  Mind,  Per- 
son, Personality,  Self,  Spirit  and 
Soul. 

Ehrenfels,  C.  von,  395. 

Einstein,  A.,  12,  216,  224,  225. 

Electrons,  93,  169ff.,  257,  267,  368, 
369. 

Emerson,  R.  W.,  561. 

Energeticists,  theory  of  physical 
reality,  241,  242. 

Energy,  269ff. 

Energy  centers,  267,  273. 

Enlightenment,  the,  417. 

Entities,  156,  159,  163,  188ff.,  neu- 
tral, 324-327. 

Epicureans,  419. 

Epistemology,  1. 

Erlebniss,  14ff. 

Error,  110-115;  and  ignorance,  111, 
112;  and  personality,  114,  115; 
as  denial  of  will  to  know  the  whole 
truth,  112-114. 

Essence  and  appearance,  184. 


568 


INDEX 


Essences,  universal,  as  objects  of 
knowledge,  94-97. 

Essential  being,  185. 

Eternal  "  now,"  the,  515,  516. 

Eternity.    See  Time-transcendence. 

Ether,  169ff.,  247,  369,  469,  474. 

Ethical  values,  400,  414-426;  and 
aesthetic  values,  440,  441,  443, 
444;  and  personality,  414,  415, 
421-423,  424;  and  social  life,  418- 
421;  evolution  of,  416-420;  ulti- 
mate place  in  human  life,  445-447. 

Ethics,  2,  9,  414-426. 

Eucken,  R.,  385,  408. 

Euripides,  417. 

European  renaissance,  416,  417. 

Event  particles,  140,  218,  221,  229, 
258,  470. 

Evil,  and  Christian  religion,  531,  534; 
mystery  of,  532-535;  and  im- 
mortality, 533;  and  the  idea  of  a 
perfect  being,  524-535;  an  inev- 
itable factor  in  the  making  of  per- 
sonal spirits,  527-535;  doctrine  of 
finite  God — no  solution  of  problem 
of,  529,  530;  dualistic  theories  of, 
525-527;  function  of  natural,  520, 
521;  hedonistic  pessimism  and  the 
problem  of,  518-520;  moral,  522- 
524;  natural,  517-521;  not  bare 
negation,  528,  529;  problem  of, 
517-535;  social  origin  of  moral, 
522-524. 

Evolution,  and  adaption,  275,  276; 
and  personality,  273-285;  ortho- 
genetic,  274,  275. 

Evolution,  life,  and  mind,  261-285. 

Evolution,  and  novelty  or  discrete- 
ness, 170ff.;  and  perfection,  501- 
516. 

Evolution,  a  process  of  soul-making, 
282-285;  and  perfection,  501-516; 
and  teleology,  272-276,  283-285. 
See  also  Organic  Evolution. 


Existence,  20;  definition  of,  30. 

Existence,  finite,  154. 

Existence  and  value,  2ff.,  12ff. 

Existents,  39,  40,  43,  153ff., 
159. 

Experience,  6ff.;  and  consciousness, 
315;  and  phenomenology,  15ff.; 
and  reality,  81ff.,  105ff.;  as  a  con- 
tinuum, 84ff . 

Extensity  and  space,  227,  228. 

Extrinsic  relations,  152. 

Ezekiel,  540. 

Faith  and  knowledge,  557;  grounds 
of,  557,  558;  kinds  of,  560,  561; 
meaning  of,  555-561;  religious, 
557,  558,  559.  ■ 

Faust,  438,  439. 

Fechner,  G.  T.,  248. 

Feeling,  aesthetic,  431-433;  and  the 
self,  430;  and  the  universe,  446, 
447;  and  values,  427-433;  as  indi- 
vidualing  and  valuing  attitude; 
427-430. 

Fichte,  J.  G.,  7,  72,  120,  154,  185, 
242,  248,  291,  353,  382,  393,  407, 
418,  492,  540,  561. 

Freedom  and  the  cosmic  order,  456, 
457. 

Freedom  and  determinism,  449,  450, 
451;  and  the  future,  453,  456,  457; 
and  the  past,  453,  454;  as  self- 
determination,  448,  451-453;  of 
choice,  448;  of  indifference,  450; 
moral,  448-457. 

Frege,  G.,  143. 

Freud,  S.,  337,  338,  339. 

Friendship,  415. 

Functional  psychology,  293,  294. 

Galileo,  389. 

Gegenstandstheorie,  39-43 ;  Gegenstand 

or  "  object,"  39ff.,  17,  39,  40. 
Geiger,  M.,  13,  216. 


INDEX 


569 


God,  185, 266, 299, 298, 399, 400, 401, 

402,  403,  464,  484,  496,  500,  525- 

535,  544,  552,  553,  558. 
Goethe,  175,  280,  305,  390,  410,  558 

(quoted),  560. 
Good,  the  highest,  423. 
Goodness,  208;    beauty  and  truth, 

434-444, 445-447.    See  also  Ethical 

Values  and  Values. 
Goods,  ethical,  415ff.,  451. 
Gotama,  493,  518.    See  also  Buddha. 
Granular  or  corpuscular  theory  of 

matter,  169ff. 
Greek  ideal  of  life,  560. 
Greek,  metaphysics,  554 ;  tragedy,  439. 
Green,  T.  H.,  154,  353,  418,  560. 
Grimm,  H.,  391. 
Groos,  K.,  431,  437. 
Ground,  principle  of,  37ff. 

Haeckel,  E.,  390. 
Haldane,  J.  S.,  252. 
Hallucinations.    See  Illusions. 
Hamilton,  Sir  Wm.,  28. 
Hamlet,  322,  363,  439. 
Happiness,  519. 
Hartmann,  E.  von,  443,  518. 
Hastings'  Encyclopaedia  of  Religion 

and  Ethics,  256,  500. 
Head,  Dr.  H.,  461. 
Hebrew  prophets,  387,  388,  416,  540, 

545;  social  life,  545. 
Hedonism,  519. 
Hegel,  G.  W.  F.,  7,  14,  82,  120;   on 

categories,    134ff.,   140,   154,   182, 

185,  197,  207,  278,  330,  382,  407, 

418,  485,  492,  503,  528,  553,  561. 
Hellenistic-Roman  culture,  545. 
Herbart,  325. 
Hicks,  G.  Dawes,  43,  324. 
Highest,  the,  549,  550,  551,  552.  See 

also  Divine,  God,  etc. 
Historical  continuity,  171-173,  176- 

178. 


Historical  culture  and  the  living 
present,  387,  388;  and  great  per- 
sonalities, 388,  389,  390,  391;  and 
the  metahistoric  realm,  392;  and 
the  ordinary  individual,  391, 
392. 

History,  170ff.;  and  individuality, 
176ff.;  and  novelty,  172ff. 

Hobson,  J.  A.,  397. 

Hoffding,  H.,  555,  560. 

Holt,  E.  B.,  324,  325,  326,  327. 

Holt,  H.,  343. 

Howison,  G.  H.,  186,  197. 

Hume,  David,  28,  69,  73ff.,  76,  82, 
112,  186,  300,  302,  309,  310,  389, 
390. 

Husserl,  Ed.,  phenomenology,  13-21, 
297. 

Huxley,  T.  H.,  73,  390,  524,  525. 

Hyslop,  J.  H.,  343. 

Idealism,  objective,  and  theory  of 
consciousness,  329-333. 

Idealism,  subjective,  or  Berkeleyan, 
239. 

Idealists,  absolute,  532. 

Idealists,  objective,  29;  theory  of 
consciousness  in,  329-333. 

Ideas  as  plans  of  action,  108. 

Identity,  and  diversity,  33,  35;  137- 
141;  generic  and  existential, 
139ff. 

Identity-theory,  458.  See  also  Mon- 
ism, Agnostic,  and  Neutral. 

Ignorance  not  same  as  error,  111,112. 

Illusions  and  hallucinations,  106. 

Immanence  and  transcendence,  of 
God  or  Overself ,  495-500. 

Immanence  of  spirit  in  nature,  486, 
487. 

Immanent  inspection,  15ff. 

Immediacy,  and  history,  553-555; 
in  knowledge,  51,  52,  124;  in  re- 
ligious knowledge,  550-553. 


570 


INDEX 


Immortality,  458-464;  a  postulate 
based  on  values  of  personality,  459, 
463,  464;  and  psychical  research, 
460-463;  difficulty  in  admitting 
continuity  of  memory  orkconscious- 
ness  of  identity,  460,  461,  463; 
parallelism  and,  459;  possible,  459. 

Individual,  definition  of,  206;  289, 
290;  rational,  as  criterion  of  value, 
207. 

Individual,  and  universal,  48,  169- 
180;  science  and  the,  177-179;  the 
true,  I74ff. 

Individualism,  ethical,  417ff. 

Individuality  as  criterion  of  reality 
and  value,  101-103,  106-108;  and 
freedom,  454;  and  order,  145,  209; 
and  reality,  212;  and  science,  173, 
251;  and  values,  434-447;  con- 
cept of,  in  objective  idealism,  290, 
329-333;  value  and  purpose,  206- 
212. 

Individuation,  180,  278-283.  See  also 
Personality  and  Self. 

Individuum,  individua,  151,  157, 
189ff.,  194ff.;  relations  between  the 
three  kinds  of,  243;  three  kinds  of, 
242. 

Infinite,  the  meanings  of  the,  480- 
485. 

Inheritance  of  acquired  characteris- 
tics, 273,  379. 

Instrumentalism.    See  Pragmatism. 

Intensive  magnitude,  138. 

Interrelationships  of  values,  434-447. 

Introspection,  difficulties  of,  302- 
305. 

Intuition,  1 ;  aesthetic  experience  as, 
433,  444. 

Intuitionism  as  theory  of  truth,  51, 
52;  intuitive  acts,  80.  See  also 
Immediacy. 

Intuitive  insight  of  the  over-self, 
494, 495. 


James,  Wm.,  14,  44,  48,  56,  58,  62, 
69,  72,  84,  147,  151,  170,  182,  186, 
205,  248,  293,  301,  304,  305,  321, 
322,  323,  349,  481,  482. 

Janet,  Pierre,  348. 

Jennings,  H.  S.,  254,  262,  263. 

Jeremiah,  540. 

Jesus,  89, 387,  388, 389, 410, 419, 464, 
493,  539,  540,  542,  552,  553.  See 
Christ. 

Joachim,  H.  H.,  on  truth,  52,  53. 

Judaism,  526,  550. 

Judgment,  25ff.,  29ff.,  49,  55. 

Jung,  C.  G.,  338. 

Justice,  415. 

Kant,  I.,  76,  82,  84,  119ff.;  "on  cate- 
gories, 134ff.;  176,  189;  on  space 
and  time,  217,  224;  353,  387,  389, 
390,  393,  414,  418,  449,  450. 

Keats,  J.,  434 

Kelvin,  Lord,  148. 

Kinds,  137ff. 

Kipling,  R.,  328. 

Knowledge  and  reality,  68-94;  Ex- 
perience and  reality,  81-94;  final 
ground  of,  116-129;  presupposi- 
tions of  validity  of,  90;  problem 
of,  9,  25ff.;  theory  of,  Book  I. 

Kuelpe,  O.,  13,  97,  297. 

Kidturgeschichte,  405. 

Laird,  John,  97. 

Lamarck,  265. 

Lee,  V.,  and  Thomson,  J.  Anstruther, 

437. 
Leibniz,  G.  W.,  154,  185,  196,    197, 

216,  242,  248,  265,  281,  285,  372, 

378,  473,  531. 
Leighton,  J.  A.,  30,  60,  116,  295,  299, 

383,  395,  481,  501,  564. 
Lessing,  G.  E.,  542. 
Libido,  the,  338. 
Liebmann,  O.,  506. 
Life,  evolution  and  mind,  261-285. 


INDEX 


571 


Life  and  matter,  276-285. 

Life  and  mechanism,  253-260. 

Life,  properties  of,  253,  254,  255,  256, 
258,  259,  278,  283,  284;  super- 
mechanical,  258-260. 

Likeness  and  unlikeness,  33,  35,  137— 
141;  degrees  and  kinds  of,  137. 
See  also  Identity  and  Diversity. 

Lipps,  Th.,  13,  118,  297,  428. 

Locke,  J.,  82,  92, 185, 186, 188. 

Lodge,  0.,  343,  369. 

Logic,  2,  296,  297. 

Lossky,  N.,  51. 

Lotze,  R.  H.,  20,  179,  182,  185,  229, 
248,  381,  472,  473. 

Love,  415, 436,  445,446,447,530,534. 

Lovejoy,  A.  O.,  94. 

Luther,  M.,  389. 

Macbeth,  439. 

Mach,  Ernst,  73,  192,  323. 

Machine,  definition  of,  256-258. 

Magnitude,  intensive  and  extensive, 
33ff. 

Mair,  Alex.,  29. 

Mass  particles,  257. 

Materialism,  185,  186. 

Material  substance,  187, 188. 

Mathematics,  128,  142,  144,  145. 

Matter,  energy  and  will,  377,  378. 

Matter,  organization  and  individual- 
ity, 250,  251,  277ff. 

Matter  and  personality,  251. 

Maxwell,  J.  Clerk,  269. 

McDougall,  W.,  345,  350. 

McGilvary,  E.  B.,  322. 

McKenzie,  J.  S.,  329,  418,  481. 

McTaggart,  J.  M.  E.,  186,  196,  248, 
378,  484,  485. 

Meaning,  17ff.,  26,  29. 

Meaning-content,  40. 

Measurement,  33ff. 

Mechanism  and  life,  253-260,  266- 
269,  272-276. 


Mechanistic  doctrine  of  evolution 
stated,  260,  261;  criticized,  267- 
271. 

Mechanistic  theory  of  life,  255,  266- 
271. 

Mediaeval  cosmology,  554. 

Mediaeval  mystics,  561. 

Mediation,  in  knowledge,  51,  52,  88, 
550-552.     See  also  Immediacy. 

Meinong,  A.  von,  14,  26,  27,  28,  39- 
43, 189,  395. 

Meister,  Eckhart,  492. 

Mendelian  theory,  280. 

Mentalism,  69. 

Mental,  order,  166. 

Metaphysics  and  phenomenology, 
13-21;  metaphysics  and  religion, 
536-561;  differences  in  methods, 
537-541;  methods  and  aims  com- 
pared, 536-549;  similarity  in  aims, 
536,  537. 

Metaphysics  and  theology,  541-544, 
547-549. 

Metaphysics  and  metasociology, 
292. 

Metempsychosis,  378,  379. 

Michelangelo,  389. 

Michelson-Morley  experiment,  224. 

Mill,  J.  S.,  73,  518,  525. 

Milton,  John,  175. 

Mind  and  body,  355-381;  dualistic 
theory  of,  355-359;  psychoneural 
parallelism,  359-362;  psychophys- 
ical individualism,  366-377;  psy- 
chophysical parallelism,  359-366; 
psychophysiological  parallelism, 
362. 

Mind  as  directive,  357-359. 

Mind  energy,  79. 

Mind,  life,  evolution  and,  261-285; 
its  place  in  evolution,  261-265, 278- 
283. 

Mind  and  physical  substance,  367- 
369. 


572 


INDEX 


Minkowski,  216. 

Minot,  C.  S.,  265. 

Mitchell,  Weir,  348. 

Mohammed,  389,  539. 

Mohammedanism,  550. 

Monad.    See  Individuum. 

Monism,  agnostic,  365,  366. 

Monism,  epistemological,  68-70; 
mind-body  theories  of,  or  qualita- 
tive, 185,  190.  See  also  Material- 
ism, Spiritualism  and  Identity- 
theory. 

Monism,  neutral,  324-327. 

Montague,  W.  P.,  324. 

Moore,  G.  E.,  97. 

Moral  evil.    See  Evil. 

Moral  freedom.    See  Freedom. 

Moses,  539. 

Multiple  personality,  348-354. 

Multiverse,  156. 

Munsterberg,  H.,  411. 

Mysticism,  Buddhistic,  Christian, 
492,  540,  560;  ethical,  540;  of 
Upanishads,  560;  sufi,  540;  ve- 
dantic,  560. 

Mysticism  in  philosophy  and  poetry, 
540,  560,  561. 

Mysticism,  religious,  491,  492,  540, 
545,  546. 

Mystics,  mediaeval,  561. 


Natorp,  P.,  142,  234ff. 

Natural,  evil.    See  Evil. 

Natural  selection,  273. 

Nature,  243,  244,  247,  472,  474,  486, 
487;  and  spirit,  486, 487;  mechan- 
ical conception  of,  257. 

Negation.    See  Negativity. 

Negativity,  124;  and  perfection, 
502,  503;  consciousness  and  per- 
sonality, 329-333. 

Neo-Kantianism,  41. 

Neo-platonic  philosophy,  545. 


Neo-realism,  llff.,  41,  97, 155ff.,  187, 
189,324-327.  See  Neutral; Monism. 

Neo-realists,  14,  28,  188. 

Neuropsychical  disposition,  340. 

Neutral  monism,  theory  of  conscious- 
ness in,  324-327.  See  also  Pure 
experience. 

New  Testament  writers,  533,  553. 

Newton,  Sir  I.,  216. 

Nietzsche,  Fr.,  418. 

Nirvana,  82,  549. 

Noetic  order,  the  ultimate,  475,  476. 

Non-being,  30. 

Nordmann,  Chas.,  226. 

Not-self,  in  knowledge,  116. 

Novalis,  561. 

Novelty  and  causation,  198-201; 
in  history,  172ff . 

"  Now,"  eternal,  515,  516;  the,  505- 
516;  the  time-spanning,  514,  515. 

Number,  138,  142-147;  and  order, 
138,  139;  145,  146;  and  space, 
147fT.;  and  time,  146;  as  one-in- 
many,  or  discrete  and  continuous, 
143-145;  definition  of,  143. 

Numerical,  order,  164,  165. 

Nunc  stans,  516. 

"  Object  "  as  Gegenstand,  17ff. 

Objectives,  40. 

Objects  of  perception,  91-94;  of 
thought,  14,  40ff. 

Oesterreich,  K.,  305. 

Ontology,  1. 

Optimism  and  pessimism,  the  prob- 
lem of  evil,  517-535. 

Order,  38ff.,  162-168;  and  number, 
138  139,  145,  146;  concept  as 
principal  of,  45ff.;  numerical,  164 
165;  causal,  165, 166;  teleological 
166;  organic  and  mental,  166 
axiological,  167;  social,  167,  168 
qualitative,  163;  spatial,  163 
temporal,  163,  164. 


INDEX 


573 


Order,  doctrine  ot(0rdnungskhre),43. 

Order  of  the  universe,  235.  See  also 
Universal  Order. 

Organic  evolution,  factors  of,  261- 
266;  and  individuation,  261-263; 
and  mind,  263-266;  and  novelty, 
265,  266;  and  sentiency,  265; 
mechanistic  doctrine  of,  260-271. 
See  also  Evolution. 

Origen,  549. 

Orphics,  378. 

Ostwald,  W.,  242. 

Ought,  transcendental,  41. 

Overself  and  personality,  479,  480; 
and  the  individual,  493-495;  473- 
479;  as  conserver  of  values  of  self- 
hood, 493 ;  as  immanent  and  trans- 
cendent, 495-500;  as  ground  of 
the  perfect  community,  493,  494; 
495-500;  finite  selves  and,  486- 
500. 

Pan-objectivism,  105. 

Panpsychism,  248-252;  arguments 
against,  249-251,  362,  363;  argu- 
ments for,  248,  249. 

Pantheism,  185,  481. 

Parmenides,  100,  473. 

Particular,  individual  and  universal, 
169-180. 

Pater,  W.,  149. 

Paulsen,  Fr.,  248. 

Pearson,  Karl,  73,  74,  192. 

Perception,  90ff . 

Percepts,  and  concepts,  44-48. 

Perfection,  and  evolution,  501-516; 
and  progress,  503-510;  and  the 
reality  of  the  temporal,  502,  503; 
the  problem,  501,  502. 

Perfection  and  teleology,  208,  501- 
516. 

Perry,  R.  B.,  94,  97,  189,  324,  325. 

Persian  religion,  526. 

Person,  definition  of,  290. 


Person,  and  science,  179ff . 

Personal  idealism,  186. 

Personalistic  or  pluralistic  idealism 
or  spiritualism,  186,  190. 

Personalities,  alternating,  348,  349- 
352;  successive,  348,  349. 

Personality  and  body,  367. 

Personality  and  the  evolutionary 
process,  261,  273ff. 

Personality,  and  truth,  108,  109; 
as  criterion  of  value,  207,  208,  209, 
211,  212;  multiple,  348-354.  See 
also  Individuality,  Self,  Soul  and 
Spirit. 

Personality,  and  civilization,  385ff.; 
and  psychology,  292-297;  and 
the  cultural  order,  382-393;  as 
microcosm,  289;  mechanism  and 
western  civilization,  562-564;  prob- 
lem of,  289-298. 

Personality  and  values,  395-413. 

Perspectives,  233,  245,  469. 

Pfander,  A.,  13,  14,  297. 

Phenomenalism,  14,  72,  81 ;  in  Berg- 
son,  78-81;  in  Bradley,  77;  in 
Hume,  73ff.;  in  Kant,  76,  77;  in 
Karl  Pearson,  74,  75. 

Physical  and  the  psychical,  rise  of 
distinction  between,  89. 

Physical  reality,  238-252;  and  per- 
ception, 245,  246;  and  sensory 
data,  239;  and  the  aesthetic  qual- 
ities, 243-244;  and  the  distinc- 
tion between  primary  and  second- 
ary qualities,  241 ;  and  the  micro- 
scopic mechanisms  of  physics, 
240,  241;  and  the  physicists  world 
of  atoms  and  electrons,  246,  247; 
and  the  sensory  system,  244,  245; 
is  a  social  reality,  239;  consists  of 
individua  in  relations,  240-243. 

Plato,  89,  106,  140,  155,  185,  378, 
382,  389,  410,  418,  435,  493,  525, 
539,  540,  560. 


574 


INDEX 


Plotinus,  72,  500,  560. 

Pluralism,  154ff.,  170,  185,  190,  485, 

490. 
Pluralistic    concepts    of    substance, 

184-186. 
Poincare,  H.,  142,  234,  481. 
Point-instants,  138,  140,  218,  258. 
Pope,  A.,  532. 
Possible,    the    realm    of    the,    11, 

43. 
Post  hoc  ergo  propter  hoc,  fallacy  of, 

165. 
Pragmatism  or  instrumentalism,  55- 

63. 
Pratt,  J.  B.,  94,  557. 
Pre-conscious,  the,  338. 
Pre-existence  theory  of  the  soul,  378, 

379,  380,  381. 
Present,  past  and  future,  506-516. 
Primary    qualities,    187,    188;    and 

secondary  qualities,  241,  268. 
Prince,  M.,  335,  340,  350,  351. 
Principle  of  sufficient  reason,  191. 
Pringle-Pattison,  A.  Seth,  197. 
Problem  of  personality,  289-298. 
Progress  and  perfection,  504-510. 
Psychological    analysis,    limitations 

of,  302,  303. 
Psychophysical  dispositions,  308, 337, 

338. 
Psychophysical  individualism,  366- 

377. 
Psychophysical  parallelism,  359-366; 

and    materialism,    362,    363-365; 

and    spiritualism    or    Berkeleyan 

idealism,  365. 
Psychologism,  14,  27,  297. 
Psychology,  and  philosophy,  298. 
Psychology,  2,  9;  and  culture,  291, 

292,  297,  298;  and  problem  of  per- 
sonality   or    selfhood,    292-298; 

logic  and  ethics,  296,  297;    place 

of,  in  system  of  the  sciences,  298; 

various  types  of,  293-296. 


Pure  experience,  and  consciousness, 

321-324. 
Purpose,  and  reality,  105.     See  also 

Individuality,      Teleology      and 

Value. 
Purposive  Order,  33ff.,  209ff.,  511ft. 
Pythagoras,  378. 

Quality,  137-138;  and  quantity, 
142-150;  qualities,  the  thing  and 
its,  181-184;  qualitative  order, 
163.  See  also  Primary,  Second- 
ary and  Tertiary  Qualities. 

Quantity,  and  quality,  142-150;  as 
relation,  146-149,  150. 

Raphael,  389. 

Rashdall,  H.,  197. 

Realism,  critical,  94-97. 

Realism,  naive,  69,  71,  72;  social, 
70,  84;   "  transfigured,"  73. 

Reality,  20,  29, 30ff.,  43;  and  knowl- 
edge, 68-97;  and  appearance,  98- 
109;  and  experience,  6ff.,  81ff., 
105ff.;  distinction  between  phys- 
ical and  mental,  238,  239;  logical 
and  existential,  247;  as  prospec- 
tive, 272ff.  See  also  Perfection 
and  Evolution. 

Reinach,  A.,  13. 

Relations  and  Relationships,  31,  32, 
37ff.,  39,  41,  43,  63,  77,  103ff., 
121f.m.,  138ff.,  146ff.;  151-161; 
and  universals,  151;  as  dynamic, 
152;  the  singularistic  theory  of, 
153,  154;  the  pluralistic  theory  of, 
154, 155;  as  transitive,  151;  imme- 
diate and  mediate,  156,  157;  not 
external  to  their  terms,  156-161, 
summary  of  theory  of,  159-161. 

Relativity  of  space  and  time,  224- 
228. 

Relevant  and  irrelevant  relations,  1, 
37,  152,  159. 


INDEX 


575 


Religion,  and  history,  541-543,  544, 
545;  as  group-reaction,  538-540; 
as  mystical  or  metahistorical  in- 
sight, 540,  545,  546;  as  total  reac- 
tion of  individual,  537,  538;  de- 
velopment of,  540,  541;  philoso- 
phy of,  2,  9,  543,  544. 

Religion,  metaphysics  and,  536-561. 

Religious  faith,  555-561;  grounds 
of,  557,  558;  kinds  of,  560,  561. 

Religious  values,  401,  402,  403,  410, 
425,  426. 

Renouvier,  C.  B.,  186. 

Retrospection,  and  introspection, 
304. 

Rickert,  H.,  178,  383,  408,  411. 

Rights,  415. 

Ritter,  W.  E.,  278. 

Rogers,  A.  K.,  94. 

Royce,  Josiah,  29,  106,  108,  182, 
186,  195,  248,  329,  353,  382,  407, 
481,  483,  506,  516,  522,  523. 

Ruge,  A.,  37. 

Ruskin,  J.,  435. 

Russell,  Bertrand,  llff.,  43,  59,  60, 
75,  142,  143,  144,  145,  189,  216, 
218,  239,  247,  324,  325,  481,  482. 

Russell  and  Whitehead,  481. 

Rutherford,  E.,  369. 

Saint    John,    492,    540,    542,    545, 

549. 
Saint  John  of  the  Cross,  492. 
Saint  Paul,  389,  410,  492,  540,  545, 

549. 
Salisbury,  Lord,  169. 
Santayana,  G.,  94. 
Satan,  523,  526. 
Satisfaction,   as   criterion  of   truth, 

58-61. 
Scheler,  M.,  13,  14,  297,  383. 
Schelling,  F.  W.  J.,  72. 
Schiller,   Frederick,   281,   435,   438, 

443. 


Schiller,  F.  C.  S.,  26,  186. 
Schleiermacher,  F.  E.  D.,  549,  560. 
Schlick,  M.,  224. 
Schopenhauer,  A.,  248,  518,  519. 
Secondary  qualities,  188;  and  primary 

qualities,  241. 
Self-realization  of  mind,  in  knowl- 
edge,   moral   endeavor,    aesthetic 
vision,  and  religion,  125. 

Self,  and  atomistic  psychology,  309, 
310;  and  the  physical  organism, 
311;  as  cause,  308,  309;  as  living 
in  attitudes  and  appreciations, 
310;  Mr.  Bradley  on  the,  312-314. 
Self,  as  ultimate  unity,  153.  See 
also  Individual,  Individuality, 
Mind;  Person,  Personality,  Soul 
and   Spirit. 

Self,  subliminal,  339-344,  345-347. 

Self,  definition  of,  291;  the  soul  and 
spirit,  in  knowledge,  84ff.,  99ff. 

Self,  and  psychophysical  dispositions, 
307,  308;  and  time,  220-221,  230, 
231;  as  knower  and  as  known, 
303,  305-308;  continuity  of,  in 
memory,  306,  307;  denial  of 
reality  of,  300-303;  immediately 
known,  303-305;  problem  of,  299; 
the  nature  of,  299-314. 

Selfhood,  three  phases  of,  352-354. 

Self-psychology,  294. 

Selves,  community  of,  69,  70,  99, 120, 
126,  382ff.,  415ff.,  489-491;  finite 
as  real,  489-491. 

Selves,  finite  and  the  Overself,  486- 
500. 

Sense  data,  136,  239ff . 

Sense  qualities,  239ff . 

Sensory  appearances,  the  primary 
physical  realities,  240,  244,  245. 

Sentiments  and  values,  428-430. 

Series,  concept  as  law  of,  45ff. 

Sexual  selection,  273. 

Shaftesbury,  560. 


576 


INDEX 


Shakespeare,  175,  374,  363,  389,  434, 
493. 

Shelley,  P.  B.,  434,  492. 

Sherrington,  C.  S.,  282,  361. 

Shotwell,  James  T.,  220. 

Sidis  and  Goodheart,  349. 

Simpson,  J.  G.,  254. 

Singularism,  153ff.,  170,  185,  190, 
472,  473,  478,  479,  485,  488,  490. 

Singularistic  concepts  of  substance, 
184-186. 

Skepticism,  122, 123. 

Social  mind,  as  test  of  truth,  117, 118. 

Social  order,  and  objective  order,  70, 
167, 168. 

Social  philosophy,  2. 

Social  psychology,  383,  384. 

Society,  and  reality,  86ff . ;  and  space 
and  time,  220,  221,  222;  of  free 
persons  the  goalof  evolution, 262ff ., 
490.    See  also  Community. 

Socrates,  389,  390,  493,  539. 

Soddy,  F.,  369. 

Sophistical  age  in  Greece,  417. 

Sophocles,  417. 

Sorley,  W.  R.,  197,  408,  411. 

Soul,  origin  of  idea  of,  89,  90,  378, 
381;  creationist  theory  of,  379- 
381;  pre-existence  theory  of,  378, 
379;  traducianist  theory  of,  379. 

Soul,  or  spirit,  as  principle  of  creative 
synthesis,  381. 

Soul-substance,  187. 

Space,  a  complex  of  relations,  228; 
and  existence,  230,  233;  and  num- 
ber, 147ff.;  and  perception,  75; 
discontinuity  of  empirical,  219; 
the  "  body  "  of  time,  229,  235. 

Space  and  time,  215-237;  and  math- 
ematical theory  of  continuity,  217, 
218;  antinomies  of,  217;  as  con- 
ceptual relations,  219-223;  as 
concretions  of  the  categories,  215, 
216  •.  as  correlative  aspects  of  na- 


ture, 223-227;  as  empirical  attri- 
butes of  sensory  data,  218,  219; 
as  perspectives  of  the  one  cosmic 
order,  235, 237 ;  as  physical  or  ob- 
jectively real,  223-235;  as  real 
relations,  226,  227;  solution  of 
antinomies  of,  232,  233;  the  rela- 
tion of  matter  to,  229, 232;  whether 
absolute  or  relative,  216. 

Space,  time  and  deity,  236. 

Space,  time  and  invariance,  234,  235. 

Space,  time  and  the  cosmic  order, 
229,  235. 

Space,  time,  life,  and  mind,  236. 

Spaulding,  E.  G.,  43,  155,  186. 

Spencer,  Herbert,  73,  261,  274. 

Spinoza,  37,  185,  196,  359,  473,  484, 
492,  502,  540,  561. 

Spirit  as  person,  290,  291. 

Spirit,  as  dynamic,  organizing  prin- 
ciple of  body,  369,  370;  or  soul, 
as  principle  of  creative  synthesis, 
280,  381. 

Spiritism,  343,  460-463. 

Spiritual  order,  167;  476-480;  486- 
500,  503,  513-516,  525-535. 

Spiritualism,  spiritualist,  153ff.,  185. 
See  also  Idealism  and  Idealists. 

Stern,  L.  W.,  186,  248. 

Stout,  G.  F.,  26,  340. 

Sturt,  H.  C.  186. 

Strong,   C.  A.,   94,   248,  361. 

Structural  psychology,  292,  293. 

Subconscious,  the,  334-337;  and 
ideas,  339;  as  the  unconscious, 
337;  automatisms  and  suggesti- 
bility as,  336;  dreams  and  the,  337, 
338;  meaning  of,  334;  memories  as, 
337;  summary  view  of,  347;  three 
types  of,  334,  335. 

Subjectivism,  27ff. 

Subliminal  Self,  339-344,  345-347. 

Subsistence,  and  subsistents,  39ff. 

Subsistents,  39,  42. 


INDEX 


577 


Sub  specie,  aeternitatis,  37. 
Substance,  36;  criticism  of  category 

of,    186-188;    definition   of,    184; 

problem  of,  180-190;  singularistic 

and  pluralistic  concepts  of,  184- 

186;  value  of,  189,  190. 
Substantial,  the,  190. 
Sufi-mysticism,  540. 
Suggestibility,  333ff. 
Supposals  (Annahmen),  39ff. 
Supreme  self  or  mind,  127-129;  and 

evolution,  128,  129. 
Supreme    spirit    or    spiritual    com- 

munitv,  477,  479,  493,  494,  496, 

497,  498,  501,  502,  503,  504,  505, 

516,  525,  531,  534,  554. 
Synthesis,  6. 
System    or    coherent    wholeness   in 

knowledge,  84ff.,  120,  121,    127- 

129. 

Taylor,  A.  E.,  on  appearance  and 
reality,  101,  102,  154,  182,  532. 

Teleological  activity,  413. 

Teleological  order,  166. 

Teleology,  198,  202,  203,  208-212 
252,  255,  256,  272-276,  278-285, 
367.  See  also  Individuality,  Pur- 
pose and  Value. 

Telepathy,  343,  344. 

Temperance,  415. 

Temporal  order,  33ff.,  163, 164,  230, 
231,  232;  and  the  trans-temporal, 
233-235,  505-516;  purpose  and 
values  and  the,  511-513. 

Tennyson,  A.,  380  (quoted),  492,  535 
(quoted),  561. 

Tertiary  qualities,  409. 

Theism,  185,  479,  480.  -See  also 
God,  Universal  Mind,  Universal 
Order,  Overself,  Supreme  Spirit, 
Trinity. 

Theology,  1,  and  metaphysics,  541- 
544,  547-549. 


Thing,  as  substance,  181,  184;  and 
its  qualities,  problem  of,  182-184. 

Things,  33ff. 

Things,  157,  240ff. 

Thinking,  what  is?,  problems  of, 
25f.;  nature  of,  31ff. 

Thomson,  J.  Arthur,  254,  255-256, 
262,  263. 

Thomson,  J.  J.,  369. 

Thought  and  experience,  82ff. 

Time,  the  "  soul  "  of  space,  235,  239; 
and  the  Cosmic  Self,  231;  a  social 
concept  of,  220,  221;  the  form  of 
succession  or  duration,  230. 

Time  and  space,  215-237. 

Timelessness,  logical,  515. 

Time-transcendence,  511-516. 

Titchener,  E.  B.,  13,  292,  360. 

Tolstoi,  L.,  435. 

Totality,  36. 

Totum  simul,  516. 

Traducianism,  378,  379. 

Transcendence.    See  Immanence. 

Transcendental  mind  as  ground  of 
truth,  119-129;  as  conscious,  123. 

Trans-spatial,  mind  as,  230,  371. 

Trans-temporal,  mind  as,  371.  See 
also  Time- transcendence. 

Trinity,  the  doctrine  of  the,  473, 
495-500. 

Truth,  beauty  and  goodness,  434, 
447. 

Truth,  and  error,  110-115;  and 
reality,  116-129,  208;  coherence 
theory  of,  52-55;  definition  of,  63- 
67;  intuitional  theory  of,  51,  52; 
pragmatic  or  instrumentalists  the- 
ory of,  55-63;  problem  of,  27ff.; 
criteria  of,  49-67;  copy  theory  of, 
49-51. 

Truthfulness,  415. 

Unconscious,  the,  337,  341,  342,  344, 
345;  dispositions,  337,  338. 


578 


INDEX 


Underhill,  Eveiyn,  305. 

Uniformity,  36. 

Units,  34. 

Universal  mind,  the,  128,  See  also 
God,  Overself,  Universal  Order. 

Universal  order,  the,  235,  467-485; 
and  absolute  idealism,  478;  and 
goodness,  476-478;  as  cosmic 
ground  of  values,  476-480;  as  in- 
variant order,  469-475;  as  spatial 
and  temporal,  467-475;  interaction 
of  physical  elements  in,  467-469, 
472-475;  passage  of  nature  and, 
468,  469-471;  ultimate  noetic 
order,  475,  476. 

Universals,  31ff,  35ff.,  41;  and  rela- 
tions, 151,  155ff.;  the  particular 
and  the  individual,  169-180. 

Unlikeness,  33,  35. 

Upanishads,  378,  560. 

Urban,  W.  M.,  395. 

Value,  and  purposiveness,  209ff.; 
and  values,  3ff.,  9,  10ff.,  41,  42, 
364,  365. 

Values,  and  feeling,  395;  and  per- 
sonality, 395-413;  and  the  self, 
395,  396;  immediate  and  mediate, 
396-398. 

Values,  absolute  or  over-individual, 
405-407;  aesthetic,  400,  401,  402, 
403,  410;  and  history,  405;  and 
persons,  404,  405,  411,  413,  414, 
415,  421,  423,  424,  425,  426;  and 
the  cosmic  order,  412,  413,  476- 
480,  511-513;  classification  of, 
398;    economic,  397,  398;    emo- 


tional, 400-402;  ethical,  400,  414- 
426;  feeling  of  and  judgment  of, 
396;  metaphysics  of,  411-413;  ob- 
jectivity of,  408-410;  practical, 
399,  400;  relations  between  main 
types  of,  402,  403,  434-447;  rela- 
tivity of,  410,  411;  religious,  401, 
402,  403,  410,  425,  426;  truth, 
398,  399. 

Vedanta  philosophy,  100,  560. 

Virtues,  415. 

Wagner,  Richard,  438. 

Walter,  H.,  280. 

Ward,  James,  85,  185,  197,  205,  248, 

265,    271,    294,    320,    340,    473, 

516. 
Warren,  H.  C,  296. 
Watson,  J.  B.,  295. 
Webb,  C.  C.  J.,  291,  500,  549. 
Wells,  H.  G.,  525. 
Whitehead,  A.  N,  142,  219,  223,  232, 

258,  468,  470,  471. 
Whitman,  Walt,  561. 
Whole  and  part  relation,  139. 
"  Will  to  believe,"  28. 
Windelband,  W.,  41,  408,  411. 
Woodbridge,  F.  J.  E.,  318. 
Woodworth,  R.  S.,  296. 
Wordsworth,  Wm,  378,  492. 
Wundt,  W.,  265,  283. 

Young,  J.  W  ,  143. 

Zeno,  the  eleatic,  217,  224. 
Znaniecki,  Fl.,  383. 
Zooism,  181. 


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